Image to Text (OCR)

What is Image to Text?

Convert images to text online free using OCR. Extract text from screenshots, photos, scanned documents. Private — runs in your browser. Powered by Tesseract.js. Browser-based image tools — no upload to servers, all processing done locally. TekPulse's Image to Text is completely free — no signup, no ads in results, and no data stored on our servers.

How to Use Image to Text Online

1. Choose the text language (English or Hindi) before uploading — this loads the matching OCR language model
2. Drop an image or screenshot into the upload area, or click to browse — JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP are all supported
3. With "Auto-recognize on upload" enabled, text extraction starts automatically; otherwise click "Extract Text" to run OCR manually
4. The tool automatically enhances the image (upscaling, grayscale, contrast boost) before recognition to improve accuracy, especially on low-resolution screenshots
5. Review the extracted text and the OCR confidence score — low confidence means the source image may be blurry or low-contrast, so a manual check is worthwhile
6. Copy the text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file

Image to Text Formula & Calculation

Before running OCR (Optical Character Recognition), this tool preprocesses your image to improve recognition accuracy: if the image is smaller than 1800px on its longest side, it's upscaled first (OCR engines perform noticeably better on higher-resolution text), then converted to grayscale using the standard luminosity-weighted formula above — which weighs green most heavily because the human eye (and most cameras) are most sensitive to green light — and finally pushed away from mid-gray to sharpen contrast between text and background, making character edges more distinct for the recognition engine.

Recognition itself is powered by Tesseract.js, a JavaScript port of Google's open-source Tesseract OCR engine, run with Automatic Page Segmentation Mode (it decides for itself whether the image is a block of text, a single line, sparse text, etc.) and 'preserve interword spaces' enabled so word boundaries aren't lost. The engine returns a confidence score (0-100%) reflecting how certain it is about the characters it extracted — this tool surfaces that score directly so you know when to double-check the output (below 60% confidence, expect noticeable errors) rather than trust it blindly.

Key Factors That Affect Your Result

1. Image resolution — Tesseract's accuracy drops sharply below roughly 150 DPI equivalent; this tool's automatic upscale to 1800px on the long edge compensates for low-resolution screenshots and phone photos, but can't recover detail that was never captured.
2. Contrast and lighting — The grayscale + contrast-boost preprocessing step specifically targets low-contrast source images (e.g., a photo of text on a textured or shadowed background), which otherwise confuse the character-boundary detection.
3. Printed vs. handwritten text — Tesseract (like virtually all general-purpose OCR engines) is trained primarily on printed fonts; handwriting recognition accuracy is substantially lower and not a strength of this tool.
4. Confidence score — A score below 60% is Tesseract's own signal that it struggled — treat extracted text from low-confidence results as a rough draft needing manual proofreading rather than a final transcript.

Why Use TekPulse Image to Text?