dannguyen

Using Python 3 + Google Cloud Vision API's OCR to extract text from photos and scanned documents

Just a quickie test in Python 3 (using Requests) to see if Google Cloud Vision can be used to effectively OCR a scanned data table and preserve its structure, in the way that products such as ABBYY FineReader can OCR an image and provide Excel-ready output.

The short answer: No. While Cloud Vision provides bounding polygon coordinates in its output, it doesn't provide it at the word or region level, which would be needed to then calculate the data delimiters.

On the other hand, the OCR quality is pretty good, if you just need to identify text anywhere in an image, without regards to its physical coordinates. I've included two examples:

####### 1. A low-resolution photo of road signs

JoaoLages

Maybe you've heard about this technique but you haven't completely understood it, especially the PPO part. This explanation might help.

We will focus on text-to-text language models 📝, such as GPT-3, BLOOM, and T5. Models like BERT, which are encoder-only, are not addressed.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been successfully applied in ChatGPT, hence its major increase in popularity. 📈

RLHF is especially useful in two scenarios 🌟:

• You can’t create a good loss function
  • Example: how do you calculate a metric to measure if the model’s output was funny?
• You want to train with production data, but you can’t easily label your production data