I've used tesseract to great affect. I don't know how your images are but if only part of the image has text in it, you should only send that part to the OCR engine. If you send the entire image and only a portion of it has text in it, chances of the OCR extracting text are slim. There are pre-processing techniques [1] you can use to crop out the part of the image that has text
Could you explain how to use a Hough transform to find areas that have text? I only recently managed to wrap my head around how it works for line detection and other shapes with the generalized form, but how would one recognize text?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Hough_transform