Tesseract is an open-source optical character recognition (OCR) engine originally developed by Hewlett-Packard and now maintained by Google and the community. It provides a C++ library (libtesseract) and a command-line tool (tesseract) that can recognize text from images in over 100 languages. The engine supports two recognition backends: a legacy engine based on character pattern matching with adaptive classifiers, and a modern LSTM-based neural network engine for line-level recognition. The architecture is modular, with separate components for page layout analysis (textord), character classification (classify), word recognition (wordrec), dictionary/DAG search (dict), and neural network layers (lstm). Training tools (src/training) allow users to build custom language models and fine-tune existing ones. The codebase is well-structured, extensively tested, and includes optimizations for SIMD (SSE, AVX, NEON, RVV). While primarily an application/library, it also has strong research elements in its LSTM training pipeline, feature extraction, and Unicode validation subsystems. The project has a long history but remains actively maintained, with recent commits addressing security, performance, and new architectures.