KabalaOCR

Tesseract langauge file for SuperMarket receipts :)

Setup a Tesseract environment

Ubuntu

You will have to build the latest version of tesseract from source (version 3), since the aptitude repositories hold an old version (v2.04).

• Download tesseract-3.01.tar.gz from http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/downloads/list
• Unpack it. (tar -zvxf tesseract-3.01.tar.gz)
• Before proceeding to the next step, make sure you have the following packages:
  • sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool
  • sudo apt-get install libpng12-dev
  • sudo apt-get install libjpeg62-dev
  • sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev
  • sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
  • sudo apt-get install libleptonica-dev
• Compile tesseract:
  • ./autogen.sh
  • ./configure NOTE: In case you will get an error about leptonica, you will have to do the following:
    • sudo apt-get remove libleptonica-dev
    • wget http://www.leptonica.com/source/leptonica-1.68.tar.gz
    • After installing leptonica, try running ./configure for tesseract again.
  • make
  • sudo make install
  • sudo ldconfig
• Download the english language file from http://tesseract-ocr.googlecode.com/files/tesseract-ocr-3.01.eng.tar.gz and unpack it into /usr/local/share/tessdata

Mac OSX

Oddly enough, homebrew hosts a newer version of tesseract (v3.0), which is good enough for us.

brew install tesseract

Interface & Commands

The workflow is divided into two phases, the first one is manual and the second we automate:

• Phase 1

  • Create an image of your receipt
  • Convert the image to a b&w tif file
  • Save the image under the receipts directory in its proper place

• Phase 2

  • Generate a box file by running: node create_box_file.js tif_file_name
  • Fix the boxing results
  • Run: coffee runner_command.coffee [reciepts dir path]