How to Seamlessly Integrate Tess4j OCR into a SpringBoot Application

1. OCR and Tesseract

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts printed, handwritten or image‑based text into editable, searchable text. The typical OCR pipeline consists of:

Image preprocessing – acquisition, binarization, denoising, rotation correction, segmentation.

Text detection – locating text lines, words or character boundaries.

Feature extraction – extracting visual features for each character.

Character recognition – matching extracted features against known character models.

Post‑processing – proofreading, formatting and layout analysis to improve readability.

Tesseract OCR is an open‑source engine originally developed by HP, open‑sourced in 2005 and now maintained by Google. It is one of the most accurate and widely used open‑source OCR engines.

Tess4j is a Java wrapper for Tesseract that provides a simple API for Java applications.

Easy integration via a straightforward API.

Cross‑platform support (Windows, macOS, Linux).

Full Tesseract functionality including multilingual recognition and custom training.

Active open‑source community.

2. Download traineddata files

Traineddata files are hosted at https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata. For the demonstration the following files are required:

Chinese simplified: chi_sim.traineddata English: eng.traineddata Copy the files to an absolute directory, e.g. F:/HeiMaTouTiao/tessdata, and reference this path in the Spring Boot configuration.

3. Integrate Tess4j into a Spring Boot project

3.1 Maven dependency

<dependency>
  <groupId>net.sourceforge.tess4j</groupId>
  <artifactId>tess4j</artifactId>
  <version>4.1.1</version>
</dependency>

3.2 Application properties (application.yml)

server:
  port: 11014

tess4j:
  data-path: F:/HeiMaTouTiao/tessdata
  chinese-train-data: chi_sim
  english-train-data: eng

3.3 Configuration class

import org.springframework.boot.context.properties.ConfigurationProperties;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;

@Configuration
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix = "tess4j")
public class Tess4jConfiguration {
    private String dataPath;
    private String chineseTrainData;
    private String englishTrainData;

    public String getDataPath() { return dataPath; }
    public void setDataPath(String dataPath) { this.dataPath = dataPath; }

    public String getChineseTrainData() { return chineseTrainData; }
    public void setChineseTrainData(String chineseTrainData) { this.chineseTrainData = chineseTrainData; }

    public String getEnglishTrainData() { return englishTrainData; }
    public void setEnglishTrainData(String englishTrainData) { this.englishTrainData = englishTrainData; }
}

4. Test image recognition

4.1 Chinese text

4.1.1 Test code

import cn.edu.scau.config.Tess4jConfiguration;
import net.sourceforge.tess4j.ITesseract;
import net.sourceforge.tess4j.Tesseract;
import net.sourceforge.tess4j.TesseractException;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.boot.test.context.SpringBootTest;
import java.io.File;

@SpringBootTest
public class Tess4jApplicationTests {
    @Autowired
    private Tess4jConfiguration tess4jConfiguration;

    @Test
    public void testChinese() throws TesseractException {
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        ITesseract iTesseract = new Tesseract();
        iTesseract.setDatapath(tess4jConfiguration.getDataPath());
        iTesseract.setLanguage(tess4jConfiguration.getChineseTrainData());
        File file = new File("F:/HeiMaTouTiao/tessdata/CaiXuKun-Chinese.png");
        String result = iTesseract.doOCR(file);
        long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
        System.err.println("Time elapsed: " + (end - start) + " ms");
        System.out.println(result);
    }
}

4.2 English text

4.2.1 Test code

import cn.edu.scau.config.Tess4jConfiguration;
import net.sourceforge.tess4j.ITesseract;
import net.sourceforge.tess4j.Tesseract;
import net.sourceforge.tess4j.TesseractException;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.boot.test.context.SpringBootTest;
import java.io.File;

@SpringBootTest
public class Tess4jApplicationTests {
    @Autowired
    private Tess4jConfiguration tess4jConfiguration;

    @Test
    public void testEnglish() throws TesseractException {
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        ITesseract iTesseract = new Tesseract();
        iTesseract.setDatapath(tess4jConfiguration.getDataPath());
        iTesseract.setLanguage(tess4jConfiguration.getEnglishTrainData());
        File file = new File("F:/HeiMaTouTiao/tessdata/CaiXuKun-English.png");
        String result = iTesseract.doOCR(file);
        long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
        System.err.println("Time elapsed: " + (end - start) + " ms");
        System.out.println(result);
    }
}

4.3 Mixed Chinese‑English text

When the image contains both Chinese and English characters, the Chinese traineddata must be used because it includes the English character set.

4.3.1 Test code

import cn.edu.scau.config.Tess4jConfiguration;
import net.sourceforge.tess4j.ITesseract;
import net.sourceforge.tess4j.Tesseract;
import net.sourceforge.tess4j.TesseractException;
import org.junit.jupiter.api.Test;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.boot.test.context.SpringBootTest;
import java.io.File;

@SpringBootTest
public class Tess4jApplicationTests {
    @Autowired
    private Tess4jConfiguration tess4jConfiguration;

    @Test
    public void testChineseAndEnglish() throws TesseractException {
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        ITesseract iTesseract = new Tesseract();
        iTesseract.setDatapath(tess4jConfiguration.getDataPath());
        iTesseract.setLanguage(tess4jConfiguration.getChineseTrainData());
        File file = new File("F:/HeiMaTouTiao/tessdata/ParagraphWithChineseAndEnglish.png");
        String result = iTesseract.doOCR(file);
        long end = System.currentTimeMillis();
        System.err.println("Time elapsed: " + (end - start) + " ms");
        System.out.println(result);
    }
}

5. Important notes

The traineddata files must retain the .traineddata suffix, and the filename prefix (e.g., chi_sim, eng) must match the language identifier supplied to setLanguage in the Java code.