📅 2024-08-11 — Session: Implemented OCR for Grocery Store Tickets

🕒 17:05–18:20
🏷️ Labels: OCR, Python, Data Analysis, Tesseract, Easyocr
📂 Project: Dev
⭐ Priority: MEDIUM

Session Goal

The primary goal of this session was to implement Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for digitizing grocery store tickets to facilitate data analysis.

Key Activities

  • Planning & Setup: Initiated the session with a plan to use Tesseract OCR in Python for processing grocery store tickets.
  • Language Configuration: Addressed issues with Spanish language data files for Tesseract, providing guidance on setting up Spanish language support.
  • Exploration of Alternatives: Considered alternative OCR solutions like EasyOCR, Google Cloud Vision, and Amazon Textract for handling multiple languages.
  • Implementation: Installed and configured EasyOCR, and developed Python scripts to process images, extract text, and save results in CSV format.
  • Integration: Integrated Pytesseract as an alternative OCR tool, ensuring seamless functionality with existing scripts.

Achievements

  • Successfully set up OCR using both EasyOCR and Pytesseract.
  • Developed scripts for processing images, extracting text, and saving results in structured CSV files.
  • Created a structured CSV format for product data, including quantities, prices, descriptions, and discounts.

Pending Tasks

  • Further testing of OCR accuracy and performance across different ticket formats.
  • Exploration of cloud-based OCR solutions for enhanced language support and scalability.