Tesseract OCR is a popular and free tool for text recognition. It supports multiple languages and works well for scanned documents and images with printed text.
Install Tesseract via package managers like Homebrew (macOS), apt (Linux), or download it from the official repository for Windows. For programming, use bindings like pytesseract in Python to integrate OCR capabilities into your applications.
While Tesseract is effective for many use cases, preprocessing the input image (e.g., binarization and noise removal) is essential to improve accuracy, especially for low-quality or handwritten text.