how to extract text from images in a pdf file using pytesseract

Question

I am trying to use below code for extracting text from images of a pdf file. The PDF file is a Contract Document which is a scanned copy of a Contract. All the pages in the pdf file are images.

When I tried using the below code to extract data, I am getting an error saying it could not read the file / could not identify the image file.

try:
    import Image
except ImportError:
    from PIL import Image

import pytesseract

pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Tesseract-OCR\\tesseract.exe'

# Simple image to string
#print(pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('C:\\Users\\Administrator\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Python\\Python37\\Scripts\\1184.pdf')))

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "C:\Users\Administrator\eclipse-workspace\tesseract\test\greetings.py", line 18, in <module>
    print(pytesseract.image_to_string(Image.open('C:\\Users\\Administrator\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Python\\Python37\\Scripts\\1184.pdf')))
  File "C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37\lib\site-packages\PIL\Image.py", line 2622, in open
    % (filename if filename else fp))
OSError: cannot identify image file 'C:\\Users\\Administrator\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Python\\Python37\\Scripts\\1184.pdf'

Please help me how to go about

Answer 1

Your trying to open a pdf file as an image. Its not possible pillow state in their docs that they do not support reading pdf file see: https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/5.1.x/handbook/image-file-formats.html

Anyhow you could tranform the pdf to an image with the library pdf2image and than open it with pillow and feed it to tesseract.