Comment by steeve

We had great results using tesseract-ocr[1] with SWT (state of the art text detection algorithm, via libccv[2]) on Linux.

You can use our python bindings for both[3,4], although they might be slightly outdated:

[1] https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

[2] http://libccv.org/doc/doc-swt/

[3] https://github.com/veezio/pytesseract

[4] https://github.com/veezio/pyccv