OCR a lot of hand written invoice and records? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TorturedChaos · 2023-12-07 14:31 I am taking over a business where the current owner had done everything via hand written records - invoices, purchase orders, inventory, etc. Once he is done with his books for this year I'm being given all of the records I want, which is going to go back several years. I plan to scan all the records in (also own a copy shop too, so I have the scanning side down), and at least organize them by year and customer or vendor. But he has some customers that will order an item repeatedly, but only do it once every 3 years or so. It would be really nice to search for part number 12345 and find out where it came from or info on it. So OCR'ing would be great. Catch is everything is hand written, and inhave tried standard OCR hooks ion handwriting with poor results. I did some searching for software that handled hand writing OCR, but mostly found pay per item online solutions. With the number of documents I have, that is doing to get really spendy. Was hoping I could find something I could run locally. Maybe something I could easily train on some of his documents by typing up a handful and feeding those to the model as examples? And while I'm asking for the moon, something with not too bad if a learning curve or needing to know python or PyTorch, as I don't know either and with taking on another business don't really have time to learn right now. Any suggestions?? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LBarouf · 2023-12-07 14:55 This is the opposite of self hosted…. In terms of handwritten notes, I found Evernote’s ability to search and identify strings of text and or numbers to be very accurate. Even with chicken scratch. Getting the notes there may be the issue for you. Fujitsu scanners are integrated, get one or use one you have and would save you time should the notes be loose. If you need to scan a ledger and turn pages, we have used an apparatus that holds a phone up. You place the book in position and the phone would take a photo of the page. Had a student go at a rate of about 45 pages a minute once she got the rhythm. May be worth reaching to them directly if you have hundred of thousands of pages or more. You can look for another, self hosted OCR, your mileage will vary. I found that the worse the handwriting in, the more inconsistent it is, less reliable solutions are and only Evernote was able to find most of the text I was looking for. My needs were similar: digitizing large volume of data and make it searchable. Good luck. Please let me know what you decide on if you don’t mind. I’m curious in case there’s a better way. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TorturedChaos · 2023-12-07 14:59 I will take a closer look at Evernote. Do you know if the data can easily be exported out of Evernote so I don't have to keep it in there? As for scanning, fortunately everything is loose and standard sizes, so I should be able to run 90% of it through the document feeder on one of our copiers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lilolalu · 2023-12-07 15:04 I would look into training a custom OCR model specifically for his handwriting. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TorturedChaos · 2023-12-07 15:05 Any recommendations on where to start with that? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- lilolalu · 2023-12-07 15:08 Haven't done this personally and I think it depends a lot on your nerd skills... https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR/blob/master/custom_model.md https://towardsdatascience.com/train-a-custom-tesseract-ocr-model-as- an-alternative-to-google-vision-ocr-for-reading-childrens-db8ba41571c8 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TorturedChaos · 2023-12-07 15:08 Thanks. I will read through those ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LBarouf · 2023-12-07 15:28 Sounds like a very good use case for Evernote. Quality of scans matters of course. But that’s the thing with cloud services or SaaS. One is perpetual monthly / yearly billing but also, no way to extract it. The search capabilities are in the cloud. Where I see its value, it’s its ability to efficiently organize and search the digitized pages. So, it’s an all in. They have a free option you can try at least to test the concept. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dazchad · 2023-12-07 16:35 paperless-ngx has OCR, but I'm not sure how good it is going to be with handwritten text. Since you have lots of documents, maybe you can buy a document scanner that has OCR integrated? I have the ScanSnap and it's beautiful! Again, I don't have handwritten notes to know if it's going to do a good job or not, but it's worth investigating. You may also ask in /r/paperless/ . They will probably have better advice. It's very hard to do OCR properly. For your case I'd frankly pay someone to do it if you have a good lead. The time saved will easily pay for itself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TorturedChaos · 2023-12-07 17:01 My copiers have OCR built in, but it doesn't work very well on handwriting. I haven't tried paperless-ngx's OCR on handwriting yet. I have paperless setup, so I will have to try it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dazchad · 2023-12-07 17:23 Sounds good. Best of luck! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rizistt · 2023-12-07 21:01 Hey! Please check out [trocr repo](https://huggingface.co/microsoft/trocr-base-handwritten) on Hugging Face. There are different versions of this model available. I am also building an Intelligent Document Processing product, I call it DataLime IDP. This is still in its very early stages. Would love to have you test the tool and see if it works for you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TorturedChaos · 2023-12-07 23:10 I would happily give it a try! I will send you a DM ---------------------------------------------------------------------- a051 · 2023-12-08 01:19 I know it's self hosted subreddit but I've literally just finished a project using AWS Textract, Microsoft and Google have their own equivalent tools too, if self hosted solutions prove insufficient. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rizistt · 2023-12-08 16:44 Thank you!