Use OpenCV to detect text blocks to send to Tesseract iOS

Question

How can I use OpenCV to detect all the text in an image, I want to to be able to detect "blocks" of texts individually. Then pass the the recognized blocks into tesseract. Here is an example, if I were to scan this I would want to scan the paragraphs separately, not go from left to right which is what tesseract does.

Image of the example

Answer 1

That would be my first test:

• Threshold the image to get a black and white image, with the text in black
• Erode it until the paragraph converts to a big blob. It may have lots of holes, it doesn't matter.
• Find contours and the bounding box

If some paragraphs merge, you should erode less or dilate a little bit after the erode.