FAQ

FAQ

What is this?

imgrep is a grep for images that leverages Tesseract OCR to search for text snippets within images.

This doesn't work!! >:(

Due to the nature of Tesseract's OCR algorithm, if fonts aren't super clear or images aren't high enough resolution, the image processing might misread characters causing your query to fail. We're looking into improving this with better image pre-processing.

What is wrong with your software? I keep getting segfaults!

Seriously there's nothing wrong with it. Make sure you've installed the relevant tesseract, tesseract-devel and leptonica-devel packages. These have different names on different systems. If run a Linux that calls them something weird, submit a PR to update the REAMDE.

imgrep doesn't do X, Y, or Z! You suck!

imgrep is an intentionally small utility that is meant to do one thing — search for text within images. If you think there is some absolutely necessary functionality missing, open an issue in our Github issue tracker.

ML / AI / DL is so much better with images, why don't you use it?

Machine Learning algorithms are only good with images when they are trained on huge datasets and when you throw a lot of CPU at them. This isn't a good idea for a utility meant to run offline on notebook computers.