Reading the badge with PaddleOCR: The future of document capture

In an increasingly digital world, the ability to transfer information from physical documents to digital formats is crucial. This is especially true for identity documents, which play a key role in many areas of life, be it identity verification, banking or legal matters. Fortunately, the world of data science has produced a groundbreaking solution: PaddleOCR. In this blog post, we will explore how PaddleOCR enables effortless and accurate reading of identity documents.

The importance of document capture

Before we dive into the details of PaddleOCR, it is important to understand why the ability to read ID cards is so important. In our digital age, physical documents are often a barrier to efficient business processes. Manually capturing information on badges is time-consuming, error-prone and can cause significant delays. There is also a risk of errors that can have serious consequences.

PaddleOCR: The revolution in document capture

PaddleOCR is an open source optical character recognition (OCR) library developed by PaddlePaddle, one of the leading machine learning and artificial intelligence platforms. This OCR engine specialises in capturing and processing text in images and is able to accurately recognise and extract ID cards and other documents.

Advantages of PaddleOCR

1. Accuracy: PaddleOCR offers high recognition accuracy, so you can be sure that the captured information is correct.
2. Speed: The OCR engine works fast and can process large volumes of documents in a short time.
3. Ease of use: PaddleOCR is user-friendly and can be used in various applications and industries.
4. Customisability: The engine can be adapted to the specific requirements of your project.

PaddleOCR’s fields of application

PaddleOCR has a wide range of uses, from capturing ID cards for customer identification in banks to automating document processes in government agencies. Here are some of the most common areas of application:

• Banking: PaddleOCR can be used to quickly verify IDs for account openings and loan applications.
• Healthcare: In healthcare, ID cards can be scanned and captured for patient identification.
• Legal: Lawyers and courts can use PaddleOCR to digitise legal documents and make them searchable.
• Transport and logistics: Driver IDs can be captured to monitor compliance.

Read the badge with PaddleOCR

Start by installing the following libraries:

pip install matplotlib paddleocr opencv-python

Then import the following libraries:

from paddleocr import PaddleOCR, draw_ocr
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import cv2 as cv2
import os

Then download the repo from PaddleOCR to get the fonts

!git clone https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

Initialise the OCR model

ocr_model = PaddleOCR(lang='de', use_gpu=False)

Create image Path to image

img_path = r"YourImagePath"

Perform PaddleOCR

result = ocr_model.ocr(img_path)

Define the information in the badge that we want to extract

relevant_information = ["badge number:", "last name:", "first name:", "date of birth:", "place of birth:", "date of expiry :"]

Extract the information from the resultExtract the information from the result

# extract information from result
j = 0
boxes, texts, scores = [], [], []
for i, res in enumerate(result[0]):
    if i not in [1, 4, 6, 11, 13, 15]:
        continue
    boxes.append(res[0])
    if j == 3:
        texts.append(relevant_information[j] + " " + res[1][0][:10]) # remove DEUTSCH at the end
    else:
        texts.append(relevant_information[j] + " " + res[1][0])
    scores.append(res[1][1])
    j += 1

Specification of the font path for the method draw_ocr

font_path = os.path.join('PaddleOCR', 'doc', 'fonts', 'latin.ttf')

Read the image

img = cv2.imread(img_path)

img = cv2.cvtColor(img, cv2.COLOR_BGR2RGB)

# Visualize our image and detections
# resizing display area
plt.figure(figsize=(15, 15))

# draw annotations on image
annotated = draw_ocr(img, boxes, texts, scores, font_path=font_path)

# show the image using matplotlib
plt.imshow(annotated)
plt.show()

Conclusion

The ability to capture IDs and other documents accurately and efficiently is critical in today’s digital world. PaddleOCR offers a powerful solution to help businesses and organisations streamline their processes and increase the accuracy of document capture. With PaddleOCR, we can take a step into the future of document capture and say goodbye to tedious manual processes.

If you would like to learn more about how PaddleOCR can improve your workflow or how you can use it in your project, our experts will be happy to help. The future of document capture has never been more exciting!