Implementing an OCR for Identity Cards — Part 1: Image Preprocessing
In this series of articles, I will take you through how I’ve implemented an OCR to detect Indonesian identity cards, or KTP for short. While I obviously cannot open-source our internal code, I can provide you with a roadmap to implementing your OCR system.
During my research, I came across several helpful articles, but there were still large gaps in specific areas which weren’t covered very well. For example:
- How to fine-tune an OCR model
- How to deploy an ML model
- How to optimize an ML model on CPU (Yes, CPU!)
These are some of the big questions that I had when I started on this journey. The techniques covered here should be applicable for a wide variety of identity cards, and even passports. Some of the techniques you see might appear sophisticated, while others might be surprisingly simple. I encourage you to experiment with multiple techniques for your specific problem domain.
Being the lazy person that I am, I didn’t implement the OCR from scratch, but instead opted to look for open-sourced solutions and beat it into submission. I…
