WD26 - OCR

Hi all,

I wonder if the new OCR functions in V26 are useable for scan and recognize incoming invoices as you see nowadays in accounting systems. Basicly to get the date, amount, vendor, invoicenumber and so on.

Arie

Depends if you want any kind of reliability...

I've worked with a colleague on such a system, and the only way to have a result you can trust is to use MULTIPLE ocr engines one after the other, and compare the results... In his case, he finally settled on 3 passes with 3 different engines, and when 2 of them at least were saying the same thing, he would accept the result as reliable.

Hi Arie,
WD is using tesseract engine for OCR

[github.com]

There you will find FAQ about quality.

In my experience any computer generated pdf is readable without problems
Scanned images mostly works fine but there can be problems as image/scanner/document quality can be very different.

BR,
Alen

Hi all,

I was wondering if such is possible with a .pdf file. Most of the time invoices are send in a .pdf form, so it would be nice to "read" the invoice
and no scanning needed. Has anybody tried this before?

Best regards,

Aad

Hi Aad,

pdftotext() is your friend.

regards Michael

Hi MIchael,

Thank you for the tip.

Best regards,

Aad



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/03/2021 10:34AM by AadG.

Hi Alen,

I also noticed WD is using Tesseract. Of course we can implement such libraries (there are others, free of paid) ourselves. I was hoping WD did some work for us, focusing on common use cases like the one I mentioned: read invoices.

I did a small test and OCRExtractText() gives you all text from the pdf or image. But there are no options yet to define named areas for a certain invoice to get let's say the invoicenumber.

There are however dozens of articles to implement Tesseract in C#, Java or Python. Like this
[www.pyimagesearch.com]

That doesn't look too hard and gives us all the options of course.

Arie

Hi Arie,

are you sure ?


[doc.windev.com]

You can define a polygone.

regards Michael

Mmh, missed that. Looks like it's possible indeed

Arie