William Ratcliff williamratcliff

Using 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

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	# -- coding: utf-8 --
	from django import forms

	from crispy_forms.helper import FormHelper
	from crispy_forms.layout import Layout, Div, Submit, HTML, Button, Row, Field
	from crispy_forms.bootstrap import AppendedText, PrependedText, FormActions


	class MessageForm(forms.Form):
	text_input = forms.CharField()

	import json
	from plistlib import readPlist
	import StringIO

	plist = open("source.plist","r").read()

	in_file = StringIO.StringIO(plist)
	plist_dict = readPlist(in_file)

	open("source.json","w").write(json.dumps(plist_dict))