🧠 Tesseract OCR API (Image + PDF | Bengali Supported | FastAPI + Swagger)

This is a self-hosted REST API for extracting text from images and PDFs using Tesseract OCR and OCRmyPDF.
It's powered by FastAPI with built-in Swagger docs and packaged as a Docker container.

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✅ Features

• 🖼️ OCR for image files (.jpg, .png, etc.)
• 📄 OCR for PDF files (.pdf) using ocrmypdf
• 🌍 Language support: English and Bengali (Bangla)
• 📚 OpenAPI & Swagger UI for testing and docs
• ⚙️ REST API — easy to integrate anywhere
• 🐳 Fully Dockerized (zero local dependencies)

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📦 Project Structure

.
├── app/
│   ├── main.py              # FastAPI server with image + PDF OCR
│   └── requirements.txt     # Python dependencies
├── Dockerfile               # Builds image with Tesseract + OCRmyPDF
├── docker-compose.yml       # Runs API container
└── README.md                # Project documentation

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🐳 How to Run (Docker)

First Time:

docker-compose up --build

This will:

• Build the image
• Install Tesseract with Bengali support
• Install OCRmyPDF and run the API server

Next Time (no need to rebuild):

docker-compose up -d

To stop it:

docker-compose down

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🌐 API Endpoints

🔤 POST /ocr — Image OCR

Extract text from an image file.

Request (multipart/form-data):

• file: image file (.jpg, .png, etc.)
• lang: language code (optional, default is eng)

Response:

{
  "text": "Extracted text here..."
}

Example cURL:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/ocr \
  -F "[email protected]" \
  -F "lang=ben"

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📄 POST /ocr/pdf — PDF OCR

Extract text from a PDF using ocrmypdf.

Request (multipart/form-data):

• file: PDF file
• lang: language code (optional, default is eng)

Response:

{
  "text": "Text extracted from the PDF file..."
}

Example cURL:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/ocr/pdf \
  -F "[email protected]" \
  -F "lang=eng"

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🔍 API Docs with Swagger

After running the container, open your browser:

http://localhost:8000/docs

You'll see interactive, auto-generated documentation with a "Try it out" feature.

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🌍 Supported Languages

Currently installed:

• eng – English
• ben – Bengali (Bangla)

Tesseract supports 100+ languages.

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➕ Add More Language Support

To add more languages, edit the Dockerfile and install the desired language packs.

Example:

To add Arabic (ara) and Hindi (hin), update this section:

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    tesseract-ocr \
    tesseract-ocr-ben \
    tesseract-ocr-ara \
    tesseract-ocr-hin \
    ...

Then rebuild the image:

docker-compose up --build

You can find the full list of available languages here:
🔗 https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tessdata

Use the language code as the value for the lang parameter in the API.

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📝 License

This project is MIT licensed — feel free to use and modify it for personal or commercial use.

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🙌 Contribute

Pull requests are welcome! You can help by:

• Adding more language support
• Improving PDF/image processing
• Adding auth, usage limits, or queue support