Tesseract
Tesseract.js is a javascript library that gets words in almost any language out of images. The Tesseract OCR engine was one of the top 3 engines in the 1995 UNLV Accuracy test. Between 1995 and 2006 it had little work done on it, but it is probably one of the most accurate open source OCR engines available. The source code will read a binary, grey or color image and output text. A tiff reader is built in that will read uncompressed TIFF images, or libtiff can be added to read compressed images. There are language files for many languages, even for text set in Fraktur and blackletter typefaces.
