How to Perform OCR in Java with Spire.OCR: Step‑by‑Step Guide

Image text cannot be edited directly; to read text from images you need OCR tools. This article explains how to implement OCR in Java using Spire.OCR.

Required Tools

IDEA

Spire.OCR for Java – Java OCR component supporting multiple languages and image formats.

Download the product package from https://www.e-iceblue.cn/Downloads/Spire-OCR-JAVA.html or import from Maven repository:

<code>&lt;repositories&gt;
    &lt;repository&gt;
        &lt;id&gt;com.e-iceblue&lt;/id&gt;
        &lt;name&gt;e-iceblue&lt;/name&gt;
        &lt;url&gt;https://repo.e-iceblue.cn/repository/maven-public/&lt;/url&gt;
    &lt;/repository&gt;
&lt;/repositories&gt;
&lt;dependencies&gt;
    &lt;dependency&gt;
        &lt;groupId&gt;e-iceblue&lt;/groupId&gt;
        &lt;artifactId&gt;spire.ocr&lt;/artifactId&gt;
        &lt;version&gt;1.9.0&lt;/version&gt;
    &lt;/dependency&gt;
&lt;/dependencies&gt;</code>

Other dependency files should be downloaded for the corresponding OS and extracted to the specified path (Linux, Windows x64).

Implementation Steps

1. Create a new project in IDEA and add Spire.OCR.jar.

2. Copy the extracted “dependencies” folder into the project directory.

3. After adding the dependencies, run the following code to scan and read text from an image.

<code>import com.spire.ocr.OcrScanner;
import java.io.*;

public class ReadImage {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        // Path to dependencies
        String dependencies = "dependencies\\";
        // Path to the image to scan
        String imageFile = "图片.png";
        // Output file path
        String outputFile = "读取图片.txt";

        // Create OcrScanner and set dependencies
        OcrScanner scanner = new OcrScanner();
        scanner.setDependencies(dependencies);

        // Scan the image
        scanner.scan(imageFile);

        // Get scanned text
        String scannedText = scanner.getText().toString();

        // Create output file object
        File output = new File(outputFile);
        // Delete if already exists
        if (output.exists()) {
            output.delete();
        }

        // Write scanned text to file
        BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(outputFile));
        writer.write(scannedText);
        writer.close();
    }
}
</code>

Example image:

OCR scan result: