https://jaidevd.com/tags/ocr/ Recent content in Ocr on Jaidev's Blog Hugo en-us Fri, 21 Jun 2024 22:04:01 +0530 https://jaidevd.com/posts/ocr-misconceptions/ Fri, 21 Jun 2024 22:04:01 +0530 https://jaidevd.com/posts/ocr-misconceptions/ <p>Over the last year, I have been working on an application that auto-translates documents while maintaining the layout and formatting. It has many bells and whistles, from simple geometric tricks to sophisticated gen-AI algorithms and microservices. But basically, the app performs the simple task of identifying text in documents, machine-translating them, and reinserting them such that the output document “looks” like the input.</p> <!-- TEASER_END --> <p>Most documents that my app has to process are PDFs. PDFs are ubiquitous but notoriously hard to analyze. Since pretty much every app is capable of producing a PDF file, its layout can get particularly nasty. Moreover there is no single <em>semantic</em> description of what comprises a <em>document</em> - e.g. an email is as much a document as a boarding pass. Who’s to say that a selfie is not a document? This means that my users can upload almost <em>anything</em> into the app, and as long as it has some text, it ought to be serviceable.</p>