Appium OCR Plugin

This is a Tesseract-based OCR plugin for Appium. It relies on Tesseract.js for the OCR processing.

Features

New OCR endpoint - call a new Appium server endpoint to perform OCR on the current screenshot, and return matching text and metadata.
OCR context - switch to the OCR context and the page source will be updated to respond with XML corresponding to text objects found on the screen.
Find elements by OCR text - When in the OCR context, using XPath will find "elements" based on the OCR XML version of the page source. These found elements can then be interacted with in minimal ways (click, getText) based purely on screen position.

Prerequisites

Appium Server 2.0+

Installation - Server

Install the plugin using Appium's plugin CLI:

appium plugin install --source=npm appium-ocr-plugin

Installation - Client

The only feature which requires an update on the client is the new getOcrText server endpoint. There are currently not any official client plugins for this feature. Some may be developed in the future. But reference, here is how to add the command to WebdriverIO:

browser.addCommand('getOcrText', command('POST', '/session/:sessionId/appium/ocr', {
    command: 'getOcrText',
    description: 'Get all OCR text',
    ref: '',
    variables: [],
    parameters: []
}))

Also for reference, here is how you might add the command to the Appium python client:

from appium import webdriver
from appium.webdriver.webdriver import ExtensionBase


# define an extension class
class OCRCommand(ExtensionBase):
    def method_name(self):
        return 'ocr_command'

    def ocr_command(self, argument):
        return self.execute(argument)['value']

    def add_command(self):
        return ('post', '/session/$sessionId/appium/ocr')


caps = {
    # set up your actual capabilities
}

# Load the driver with the extension
driver = webdriver.Remote("http://127.0.0.1:4723", desired_capabilities=caps, extensions=[OCRCommand])

# now you can use `driver.ocr_command`
result = driver.ocr_command({})

driver.quit()

Activation

The plugin will not be active unless turned on when invoking the Appium server:

appium --use-plugins=ocr

Usage

Response value terminology

Here is the meaning for the various response values you might find while using this plugin:

confidence - Tesseract's confidence level (on a scale of 0 to 100) for the result of the OCR process for a given piece of text
bbox - "bounding box", an object containing values labeled x0, x1, y0, and y1. Here, x0 means the left-hand x-coordinate of the box defining the discovered text, x1 means the right-hand x-coordinate, y0 means the upper y-coordinate, and y1 the lower y-coordinate.

`getOcrText` endpoint

Sending a POST request to /session/:sessionid/appium/ocr will perform OCR on the current screenshot and respond with a JSON object containing three keys:

words - Tesseract's guess at individual words
lines - Tesseract's guess at lines of text
blocks - Tesseract's guess at contiguous blocks of text

Each of these keys references an array of OCR objects, themselves containing 3 keys:

text: the text discovered
confidence: the confidence of the correctness of the resulting text
bbox: the bounding box of the discovered text (see above)

The `OCR` context

With this plugin active, you will notice an extra context available in a call to getContexts: OCR. When you switch to the OCR context (via driver.setContext('OCR') or equivalent), certain commands will have new behaviours.

Get Page Source

When retrieving page source in the OCR context, the result will be an XML document with basically the same data as that returned by the getOcrText command. Here is an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<OCR>
    <words>
        <item confidence="82.16880798339844" x0="196" x1="237" y0="528" y1="542">photo</item>
        <item confidence="87.81583404541016" x0="243" x1="288" y0="527" y1="542">library</item>
        <item confidence="92.86579132080078" x0="21" x1="69" y0="567" y1="581">Picker</item>
    </words>
    <lines>
        <item confidence="87.97928619384766" x0="34" x1="66" y0="18" y1="30">9:38</item>
        <item confidence="64.12049865722656" x0="312" x1="355" y0="18" y1="29">T -</item>
        <item confidence="88.1034164428711" x0="154" x1="221" y0="59" y1="75">The App</item>
        <item confidence="92.1086654663086" x0="9" x1="179" y0="99" y1="110">Choose An Awesome View</item>
        <item confidence="92.64363098144531" x0="21" x1="93" y0="136" y1="149">Echo Box</item>
        <item confidence="89.5836410522461" x0="21" x1="327" y0="157" y1="172">Write something and save to local memory</item>
    </lines>
    <blocks>
        <item confidence="87.97928619384766" x0="34" x1="66" y0="18" y1="30">9:38</item>
        <item confidence="64.12049865722656" x0="312" x1="355" y0="18" y1="29">T -</item>
        <item confidence="88.1034164428711" x0="154" x1="221" y0="59" y1="75">The App</item>
        <item confidence="92.1086654663086" x0="9" x1="179" y0="99" y1="110">Choose An Awesome View</item>
        <item confidence="92.64363098144531" x0="21" x1="93" y0="136" y1="149">Echo Box</item>
        <item confidence="89.5836410522461" x0="21" x1="327" y0="157" y1="172">Write something and save to local memory</item>
    </blocks>
</OCR>

Find Element(s)

When in the OCR context, you have access to a single locator strategy: xpath. The value of your selector will form the basis of a query against the page source as retrieved and described in the previous section. Any matching elements will be returned to your client. These elements will not be standard UI elements (i.e., XCUIElementTypeText or android.widget.TextView). Instead they are a sort of "virtual" element that only allows the following methods:

Click Element: perform a single tap action at the center point of the bounding box for the selected element
Is Element Displayed: always returns true, since if the element weren't displayed, it wouldn't be amenable to OCR
Get Element Size: returns data from the bounding box in the appropriate format
Get Element Location: returns data from the bounding box in the appropriate format
Get Element Rect: returns data from the bounding box in the appropriate format
Get Element Text: returns the text discovered via the OCR (same text as in the page source output)
Get Element Attribute: only one attribute (confidence) can be retrieved, and it returns the confidence value

As an example of how this might be used, assuming we're in the OCR context and that the page source matches the example above, we could do the following (in WebdriverIO; adjust as appropriate for other client libraries):

const element = await driver.$('//lines/item[text() = "Echo Box"]')
await element.click()

This clicks the center of the screen region where Tesseract has found the "Echo Box" text line to be located.

Settings

Sometimes it will be necessary to tweak the operation of the plugin in various ways. These settings are available to you to do that. You can either set them as capabilities (e.g., appium:settings[<settingName>] = <settingValue>) or use your client library's settings update functionality (e.g., driver.updateSettings(...)).

Setting name	Description	Default
`ocrShotToScreenRatio`	(Number) Sometimes, the dimensions of the screenshot returned by a platform differ from the screen coordinates used by the platform. In this case, conversion is required so that returned locations match the actual screen locations, not the pixel locations of the screenshot image. The number her corresponds to the factor by which the screenshot has been enlarged relative to the screen coordinates.	`3.12` for iOS, `1.0` otherwise
`ocrDownsampleFactor`	(Number) how much you would like to shrink the screenshot before performing OCR on it. The reason to do this would be to try to speed up the OCR algorithm. `1.0` means no shrinking, and `2.0` means shrinking by a factor of 2.	`3.12` for iOS, `null` otherwise
`ocrInvertColors`	(Boolean) If you are dealing with a dark mode screen you may want to invert the colors as Tesseract mostly expects light background and dark text.	`false`
`ocrContrast`	(Number) by default this plugin will attempt to increase the contrast in the image for a better OCR result. You can set this to a value between `-1.0` (maximum reduce contrast) and `1.0` (maximum increase contrast). `0.0` means to perform no contrast adjustment at all.	`0.5`
`ocrLanguage`	(String) a `+`-separated list of language names for Tesseract to download training data for.	`'eng'`
`ocrValidChars`	(String) a list of characters for Tesseract to consider during OCR; `''` means all characters. You can fill out your own list if you know you only expect certain characters, and it might improve accuracy and reliability.	`''`

Development

PRs welcomed!

Setup

Clone repo
npm install
npx tsc

Run tests

Link this repo into an Appium server (e.g., appium plugin install --source=local $(pwd) from this plugin development directory)
Start the Appium server (e.g., appium --use-plugins=ocr)
export the TEST_APP_PATH env var to a path to TheApp.app.zip (https://github.com/cloudgrey-io/the-app/releases)
npm run test:unit
npm run test:e2e

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