Get Your Free OCR API Key

Register here for your free OCR API key. The OCR API provides a simple way of parsing images and multi-page PDF documents (PDF OCR) and getting the extracted text results returned in a JSON format. The OCR API has three tiers/levels. The free OCR API plan has a rate limit of 500 requests within one day per IP address to prevent accidental spamming.

For even faster response times and guaranteed 100% uptime PRO plans are available. The PRO OCR API runs on physically different servers than our free OCR API service. You receive the URLs for the global PRO endpoints and your API key in the welcome email directly after you have signed-up for the PRO or PRO PDF account. The PRO OCR API can also be purchased as a locally installable on-premise OCR software.

You can check the API performance and uptime at the API status page.

Now it's time to get started: Below you find example code for calling the API from Postman, AutoHotKey (AHK), cURL, C#, ASP.NET, Delphi, iOS, Java (Android app), Node.JS NPM, Python, C++/QT, Ruby, and Javascript. (If you have code examples for other languages, please let us know and we will add them to this list).

Faster OCR with the PRO plans

For our OCR PRO plans we use redundant high-performance API endpoints in the US, EU and Asia regions. We guarantee 100% uptime or money back. Our hosted PRO OCR plans:

• - Monthly plans, cancel anytime. To subscribe, please see the links in the table above. If the embedded checkout does not work in your browser, please use our classic web store for the PRO and PRO PDF plans.


• - Yearly pre-paid plans with a 20% discount (Order PRO yearly and Order PRO PDF yearly)
  
  
• - Custom OCR server (starting at US$ 299/month). We set up OCR servers just for your data at a location of your choice. These serves include unlimited conversions (limited only by hardware). Contact us for a quote.

In addition to connecting to our PRO OCR servers, you can also directly buy our OCR software and host it yourself. This option is described in the next paragraph below.

OCR.space Local Self-hosted, On-Premise OCR Server

OCR.space Local - Enterprise Image and PDF OCR
OCR.space is powerful server-based OCR software for automated document capture and PDF conversion. With OCR.space Local you can install and host our popular OCR API and Searchable PDF creation software on your own PC and/or inside your data-center. The installation on virtualized and cloud environments like Amazon AWS AMI or Microsoft Azure is fully supported. Technically the local OCR server is identical to our popular online OCR API service. Switching from cloud to on-premise or vice-versa requires no code changes. The on-premise version has the same features, same API parameters and the same OCR quality as the OCR.space PRO PDF plan, but runs 100% local and offline - it never contacts the Internet.
OCR.space is available as hosted solution (subscription) or as installable software (one time payment).
For more information and to order OCR.space Local licenses please contact sales.

The Free OCR API Endpoint (POST)

Free OCR APIhttps://api.ocr.space/parse/image The API supports https:// (SSL) and plain http:// connections.

"GET" OCR API Endpoint

Using an OCR API was never easier...

Besides the full-featured "POST" OCR API at /parse/image we provide an additional OCR API endpoint at /parse/ImageUrl for GET requests. While not as versatile as the POST API, it is easy to use. Everything you need for the api call is inside the URL.

Example (just click the link to start the OCR):
https://api.ocr.space/parse/imageurl?apikey=helloworld&url=https://dl.a9t9.com/ocr/solarcell.jpg

The default OCR language is English. To use another language, add &language to the url. You can also request the x/y word coordinates with isOverlayRequired:
https://api.ocr.space/parse/imageurl?apikey=helloworld&url=https://dl.a9t9.com/ocr/solarcell.jpg&language=chs&isOverlayRequired=true

The important limitation of the GET api endpoint is it only allows image and PDF submissions via the URL method, as only HTTP POST requests can supply additional data to the server in the message body. GET requests include all required data in the URL. So by design, a GET api cannot support file uploads (file parameter) or BASE64 strings (base64image).

The GET API is easy and fast to use. Just note that the URL with the api key might be stored in your browser's history. But this is not a security problem because even if somebody gains access to your personal API key, he or she can not access any information about you or the OCR'ed documents, because we do not store such information in the first place. The worst-case scenario is that somebody uses all your free conversions. If this might be a problem for your application, simply continue to use the fully SSL-encrypted POST version of the API or switch to the PRO OCR API, which provides additional options.

Post Parameters

The table below lists all possible API parameters. As additional documentation, we published a sample api call collection that you can load into Postman. And last but not least: Our free online ocr form on the front page is nothing else than a POST call to the free OCR API endpoint and can be used for testing as well.

Select the best OCR Engine

The OCR API offers different OCR engines with different processing logic. We recommend that you try them all and then use whatever engine gives you the best OCR result. You can easily compare all OCR engines with our online OCR portal on the front page and with the OCREngine=1/2 parameter in your API call.

Features of OCR Engine 1:

• - Supports many languages (including Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean)
• - Fastest OCR
• - Supports larger images
• - Multi-Page TIFF scan support
• - Parameter: OCREngine=1

Features of OCR Engine 2:

• - Very good text recognition for special characters like §$@$€/()[]{}
• - Very good text recognition for text on confusing backgrounds e. g. text on images, road signs,license plates, Memes or even some CAPTCHA.
• - Supports Western Latin Character languages (English, German, French,...) and Chinese OCR
• - Usually better at single number OCR, single character OCR and alphanumeric OCR in general (e. g. SUDOKO, Dot Matrix OCR, MRZ OCR, Single digit OCR, Missing 1st letter after OCR, ... )
• - Usually better with rotated text (Forum: Detect image spam)
• - The recognition logic works different than OCR Engine 1. So if you have a situation where E1 can not read your image/document correctly, try it with Engine2 - it might work!
• - Parameter: OCREngine=2

The returned OCR result JSON response format is identical for both OCR engines. So changing the OCR engine requires no code changes. You only need to change the OCR engine parameter "OCREngine=1 [or 2]".

The overall OCR API features e. g. detect orientation, receipt scanning and PDF OCR/searchable PDF creator are the same for both OCR engines. If you have any question about using the different OCR engines, please ask in our OCR API Forum.

Response

The API returns results in JSON format. The result typically contains the ExitCode, Error details (if occurred) and a bunch of parsed results for the Image / PDF pages. Please check below the response the Web API returns and definition of various parameters. The illustration below shows success and error responses.

{
        "ParsedResults" : [
            {
                "TextOverlay" : {
                    "Lines" : [
                        {
                            "Words": [
                                {
                                "WordText": "Word 1",
                                "Left": 106,
                                "Top": 91,
                                "Height": 9,
                                "Width": 11
                                },
                                {
                                "WordText": "Word 2",
                                "Left": 121,
                                "Top": 90,
                                "Height": 13,
                                "Width": 51
                                }
                                .
                                .
                                .
                                More Words
                            ],
                            "MaxHeight": 13,
                            "MinTop": 90
                        },
                        .
                        .
                        .
                        .
                        More Lines
                    ],
                "HasOverlay" : true,
                "Message" : null
                },
                "FileParseExitCode" : "1",
                "ParsedText" : "This is a sample parsed result",
                                        
                "ErrorMessage" : null,
                "ErrorDetails" : null
            },
            {
                "TextOverlay" : null,
                "FileParseExitCode" : -10,
                "ParsedText" : null,
                                        
                "ErrorMessage" : "...error message (if any)",
                "ErrorDetails" : "...detailed error message (if any)"
            }
            .
            .
            .
            ],
        "OCRExitCode" : "2",
        "IsErroredOnProcessing" : false,
        "ErrorMessage" : null,
        "ErrorDetails" : null
        "SearchablePDFURL": "https://....." (if requested, otherwise null) 
        "ProcessingTimeInMilliseconds" : "3000"
    }
                        

Searchable PDF

You can create searchable PDFs (sometimes also called Sandwich PDFs) directly via the API. The PDF is returned as download link in the API JSON response the form of "SearchablePDFURL": "...". The download link is valid for one hour, after this time the document is deleted from our OCR servers.

The isCreateSearchablePdf = true switch triggers the generation of the searchable PDF. By default, the added text layer is visible - - this is ideal for testing the result as you can compare the OCR'ed output directly with the scan image. By adding isSearchablePdfHideTextLayer = true you make the text layer invisible. Creating a searchable PDF from the OCR result takes additional processing time, so you should only activate this feature if you need the OCR result in PDF format.

NOTE: You must use both parameters, isCreateSearchablePdf = true and isSearchablePdfHideTextLayer = false or true, otherwise the generated PDF contains no text layer.

When used with the free OCR API tier, the generated PDF contains a watermark "Generated by OCR.space" in the lower right corner. With the PRO OCR API, no watermark is added to the PDF.

Code Examples

The fastest way to test the OCR API is to make a GET call - just copy the URL in your web browser.

Test API with the Postman App

Getting started: Use the free Postman app for Windows, Mac and Linux to test the OCR API and play with the different parameters.

(a) Provide image/PDF to be OCR'ed via URL

The screenshots below show the settings for sending the image/PDF via a URL. Note that the encoding is set to multipart/form-data.

In all cases (file upload via URL, file or base64) the api key (password) is sent in header:

(b) Upload image/PDF to be OCR'ed from your server/PC

Same Postman app, but this time we are using the "File" setting to upload the image or PDF.

(c) Send image as Base64 string

Same Postman app, but this time, we are using the "Base64Image" parameter to send the image as string.

Tip: Make sure there is no extra "new line" after pasting a base64 string into Postman. If there is, the API will (rightfully) return a "Not a valid base64 image." error.

Test BASE64 strings

The links open a text file in the browser: Image Base64 String, TIFF Base64 String, PDF as Base64 string. You can copy and paste the content of these text files directly into the "base64image" field of Postman, or any other test code.

Important: The base64 string must start with the content type of the document. For example use data:image/jpeg;base64,data string here, data:image/png;base64,data string here or for PDF documents data:application/pdf;base64,data string here. Most online image to base64 conversion services do not add this header, they just provide the raw data string. Thus you must add it manually when you use such strings for testing.

cURL command-line

(a) Provide image/PDF to be OCR'ed via URL

curl https://api.ocr.space/Parse/Image -H "apikey:helloworld" --data "isOverlayRequired=true&url=http://dl.a9t9.com/blog/ocr-online/screenshot.jpg&language=eng"

curl is an open source command line tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax. The libcurl library is portable. It builds and works identically on nearly any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux,...).

(b) Upload image/PDF to be OCR'ed from your server/PC

curl -H "apikey:helloworld" --form "file=@screenshot.jpg" --form "language=eng" --form "isOverlayRequired=true" https://api.ocr.space/Parse/Image

Note: @screenshot.jpg assumes an image with name "screenshot.jpg" is in the same directory as cURL.exe. Note that the isOverlayrequired (default: no) and the language (default: eng) parameters are optional.

(c) Send image as string in Base64 format

curl -H "apikey:helloworld" --form "base64Image=data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/AAQSk [Long string here ]" --form "language=eng" --form "isOverlayRequired=false" https://api.ocr.space/parse/image

The base64 string in this example is truncated. You can download the full command line as Windows batch file from GitHub.

We have some test base64 strings available for download.

C# (Visual Studio Project)

There is a ready-to-use Visual Studio C# sample project for using the OCR API from C# on GitHub.

The test app allows you to upload and test any image quickly with the OCR API.

For a real-life example, look at the popular "ShareX" productivity tool:



ShareX uses the OCR.space PRO API and the full C# source code is available.

iOS: Objective-C and Swift

The user-provided code snippets for Objective-C and Swift are a good starting point for iPhone apps with OCR features.

Android: Java

Using Android? Look at this Android sample app that uses the free OCR API. The Java app shows how to call the API using HttpsURLConnection from user "bsuhas". And here is another, different Java repo from user "Globalizer". Thanks to both for providing this code snippet.

PHP OCR API Demo Web App

For PHP we have a complete, ready-to-run demo web app that allows the user to select a document and then uploads the image or PDF document to the OCR API.

You find the full source code at Github .

Python

Here is an example of how to access the API from Python using the requests.post command.

The full source code can be found on GitHub (thanks to user "Zaargh" for providing this code snippet). Another Python wrapper for our OCR SDK is available from GitHub user a4fr (thanks to everyone for creating code snippets).

Also, we created Python code to draw the overlay on top of the input image. This can be very useful for testing and visualizing the OCR result:

AutoHotKey (AHK)

AHK is a popular Windows Macro Recorder. For windows automation projects that require to recognize text on images you can connect to the OCR API with CreateFormData(PostData, ContentType, oForm). This AHK forum post has the details.

C++/QT

Using C++? Jhiroka from UCLA shared this example with us: C++/QT OCR API sample app.

If you are using the C++ Casablanca Library for the HTTP POST call, note that you need to url encode the image data on top of Base64 encoding. The C++ library Casablanca does not seem to do this automatically (unlike Postman does), so use the function web::uri::encode_data_string to encode the file data after Base64 encoding the request.

Go

User Matteo made a Github repository with a Go module for the OCR API.

Ruby

Using Ruby? Suyesh shared this Ruby gem (library) with us: OCR API Ruby gem.

Perl

Using Perl? Then have a look at this OCR API user submitted Perl OCR.space module.

Powershell

We have a Powershell OCR code snippet. This includes downloading the generated sandwich PDF.

Javascript

Chrome extension

The open-source Copyfish Chrome, Edge and Firefox extension uses our OCR API. You find its Javascript source code here. This includes code that shows how to process the returned text overlay data. Note the Copyfish extension uses the PRO OCR API version.

Test it: You can install the Copyfish OCR extension in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.

NPM/Node.js

The latest OCR API Node.JS wrapper is from user DavideViolante. It allows you to specify the OCR Space API endpoints (Free and PRO).

Older Node.JS wrappers: User Dennis.K published a NPM package for the OCR API and Anthony Luzquiños released an updated NPM package for the OCR API.

Jquery

//Prepare form data
var formData = new FormData();
formData.append("file", fileToUpload);
formData.append("url", "URL-of-Image-or-PDF-file");
formData.append("language"   , "eng");
formData.append("apikey"  , "Your-API-Key-Here");
formData.append("isOverlayRequired", True);
//Send OCR Parsing request asynchronously
jQuery.ajax({
url: https://api.ocr.space/parse/image,
data: formData,
dataType: 'json',
cache: false,
contentType: false,
processData: false,
type: 'POST',
success: function (ocrParsedResult) {
//Get the parsed results, exit code and error message and details
var parsedResults = ocrParsedResult["ParsedResults"];
var ocrExitCode = ocrParsedResult["OCRExitCode"];
var isErroredOnProcessing = ocrParsedResult["IsErroredOnProcessing"];
var errorMessage = ocrParsedResult["ErrorMessage"];
var errorDetails = ocrParsedResult["ErrorDetails"];
var processingTimeInMilliseconds = ocrParsedResult["ProcessingTimeInMilliseconds"];
//If we have got parsed results, then loop over the results to do something
if (parsedResults!= null) {
//Loop through the parsed results
$.each(parsedResults, function (index, value) {
var exitCode = value["FileParseExitCode"];
var parsedText = value["ParsedText"];
var errorMessage = value["ParsedTextFileName"];
var errorDetails = value["ErrorDetails"];
var textOverlay = value["TextOverlay"];
var pageText = '';
switch (+exitCode) {
case 1:
pageText = parsedText;
break;
case 0:
case -10:
case -20:
case -30:
case -99:
default:
pageText += "Error: " + errorMessage;
break;
}

$.each(textOverlay["Lines"], function (index, value) {
..........................
..........................
..........................
LOOP THROUGH THE LINES AND GET WORDS TO DISPLAY ON TOP OF THE IMAGE AS OVERLAY
..........................
..........................
..........................
});
..........................
..........................
..........................
YOUR CODE HERE
..........................
..........................
..........................
});
}
}
});