OCR Date Extractor

Flask API to extract dates from documents

How to use

The API is provided with 2 routes:

If you want to pass Base64 encoded image, send a POST request with payload {"base_64_image_content": <base_64_image_bytes>} to

https://ocr-date-extractor.herokuapp.com/extract_date

If you want to pass image file, send a POST request with payload {'image': <image_file>} to

https://ocr-date-extractor.herokuapp.com/extract_date_from_image

Python sample code to test out the API:

Sending the image as Base64 encoded

import requests, base64
img_url = <path_to_image>
with open(img_url, 'rb') as f:
    img = base64.b64encode(f.read())
response = requests.post('https://ocr-date-extractor.herokuapp.com/extract_date', data={'base_64_image_content':img})
print(response.content)

Directly uploading the file

import requests
url = "https://ocr-date-extractor.herokuapp.com/extract_date_from_image"
files=[
  ('image',('document.png',open('/Users/tushar/peak/document.png','rb'),'image/png'))
]
response = requests.post(url, data=payload, files=files)
print(response.text)

Working

The project performs the following steps for any given image:

Re-scales the image if its too big in size
Performs thresholding to separate foreground (the document) and the background
Find contours and draws a bounding box on the document present in the image
Crops the image to keep only the document
Performs thresholding again to separate text from the background
Apply OCR to extract text
Use regex to extract out the date
Date is then parsed and returned in YYYY-MM-DD format

Supported Date Formats

Following date format are supported with some flexibility:

dd-mm-yyyy
mm-dd-yyyy
yyyy-mm-dd
dd/mm/yyyy
mm/dd/yyyy
yyyy/mm/dd
Aug23'19
Feb 24, 2019
24 May'19

References

I took help from the following resources:

Improving OCR Accuracy Medium
OpenCV Docs
Automatic Canny Edge PyImageSearch

techytushar/ocr-date-extractor

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