Detect and extract text from images

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The Cloud Vision API lets you use optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities for text detection from images. This means you can use Cloud Vision for computer vision tasks like image analysis and dense document text detection, including handwriting extraction.

Cloud Vision API provides two annotation features that support optical character recognition (OCR):

TEXT_DETECTION detects and extracts text from any image. For example, a photograph might contain a street sign or traffic sign. The JSON includes the entire extracted string, as well as individual words, and their bounding boxes.
DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION also extracts text from an image, but the response is optimized for dense text and documents. The JSON includes page, block, paragraph, word, and break information.

Learn more about DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION for handwriting extraction and text extraction from files (PDF or TIFF).

Try it for yourself

If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how Cloud Vision performs in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

Try Cloud Vision free

Text detection requests

Set up your Google Cloud project and authentication

If you have not created a Google Cloud project, do so now. Expand this section for instructions.

Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

Roles required to select or create a project

Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator role (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains the resourcemanager.projects.create permission. Learn how to grant roles.

Go to project selector

Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

Enable the Vision API.

Roles required to enable APIs

To enable APIs, you need the serviceusage.services.enable permission. If you created the project, then you likely already have this permission through the Owner role (roles/owner). Otherwise, you can get this permission through the Service Usage Admin role (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin). Learn how to grant roles.

Enable the API

Install the Google Cloud CLI.

If you're using an external identity provider (IdP), you must first sign in to the gcloud CLI with your federated identity.

To initialize the gcloud CLI, run the following command:

gcloud init