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

tkellen

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=frame-nopass.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f frame.pdf

madrobby

# Two things are important to note: 
#
# 1) The code is fugly, because it was a JavaScript/iPad experiment. 
#    I know that it is ugly, so pretty please don't comment on that part.
# 2) I tried to use as many CoffeeScript features as possible,
#    including but not limited to list comprehensions,
#    heredocs, destructuring assignment and also the "do" operator
#
# I welcome comments about stuff that is not CoffeeScripty enough, or what I should
# write differently.