Foo jimmytuc

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

	<?php

	/**


	This Scheduler will run once every minute unlike the Heroku scheduler which only runs every 10 mintues.

	To use this scheduler with Laravel 5.4+ add this file to /app/Console/Commands/RunScheduler.php
	Register this file in app/Console/Kernel.php

	function p_str_replace($argFind, $agrReplace, $theString) {
	$needle_replace = $theString; // handle the string need to be replace
	array_walk($argFind, function($val, $key) use(&$needle_replace, $agrReplace) {
	$needle_replace = call_user_func_array('str_replace', array($val, $agrReplace[$key], $needle_replace));
	});
	return $needle_replace;
	}

	// testing purpose
	$the_str = array(

	// Copyright Stephen Feather and other contributors.
	//
	// Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
	// copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
	// "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
	// without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
	// distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit
	// persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the
	// following conditions:
	//

	for (var i = 0; i < 1024 * 1024; i++) {
	process.nextTick(function () { Math.sqrt(i) } )
	}