title: Improve Tesseract OCR results with blurred text
body: <p>I am working on OCR recognition of printed text. In particular I am focusing on the preprocessing step to improve the results of the <a href="https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/" rel="noreferrer">Tesseract</a> engine.
  I have already obtained good results with adaptive thresholding, noise removal, text deskew, etc... But still Tesseract seems to fail when other commercial product return decent results.</p>
  
  <p>I used the following test image and here are the results obtained with Tesseract 3.04 compared to two commercial OCR apis. All the 3 services were provided with the same binary image that contains some slightly blurred text.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/1BIWi.png" alt="Text image used to compared the 3 OCR products"></p>
  
  <p><strong>Tesseract</strong></p>
  
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  <p><strong>ABBYY <a href="https://finereaderonline.com/en-us/Tasks" rel="noreferrer">Fine Reader Online</a></strong></p>
  
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  <p><strong><a href="http://www.onlineocr.net/" rel="noreferrer">Online OCR</a></strong></p>
  
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  <p>Now I wonder whether the big gap between Tesseract and the other two products is due to a different engine (for sure ABBYY uses its own engine, not sure about OCR Web Service) or there are some other preprocessing steps that can be done before running Tesseract. Do you have any suggestions?</p>