Combining Optical Character Recognition and Object Detection for Document Processing
Let’s face it; Processing documents is tedious and paperwork is boring. Computer vision can help us do less of it!
Confession; I have terrible handwriting. I attribute part of the blame to my childhood where I learned to write cursive in England and then had to switch back to non-cursive in Sri Lanka where cursive is uncommon. It doesn’t help that my ADHD tends to make my writing hurried and careless as well. I like to joke that my brain moves too fast for my hand to keep up with whenever someone complains. 😉
The field of computer vision has seen tremendous development in the recent past leading to a host of practical applications in a wide variety of industries and use cases. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is one such application of computer vision with the potential to automate many tedious but necessary tasks. OCR technology can be used to process digital documents (PDFs, scanned documents, images of documents and the like), far more efficiently than humans can. In a nutshell, OCR can “read” a document and convert images of text into actual text. Current state-of-the-art algorithms are capable of near-flawless recognition of printed text, with handwriting recognition not too far behind (as…
