tesseract name_to_image_type:Error:Unrecognized image type

Error:

tesseract test.png output.txt
Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine
name_to_image_type:Error:Unrecognized image type:test.png
IMAGE::read_header:Error:Can’t read this image type:test.png
tesseract:Error:Read of file failed:test.png

Cause: You are using tesseract version <=2.0.4

Solution:

1. convert png to tif:

convert test.png -background white -alpha remove -flatten -alpha off test.tif

2. Upgrade teeseract to latest version