I recently worked on extraction of text from images in perl using tesseract.
Below is the approach I followed and worked well for me:
1. Download executable of tessract-OCR. Best way to do that is using SVN link for download. Need to follow all steps in
SVN link
2. Tesseract-OCR has dependency on Leptonica (www.leptonica.com)
3. Once everything goes well install 'Image::OCR::Tesseract' from CPAN. If 1 and 2 works fine, all tests should pass and the installation should be successful.