Convert a Photo of a Document into Text in Python
We’ve seen in a prior article how the Cloudmersive OCR API can transition scanned physical documents into text with ease. In this article, we’ll run through an iteration of the OCR API (/OCR/photo/toText) which provides another layer of OCR convenience, enabling your application to scan photos of documents and convert them into text. This is really practical and useful for small/individual businesses without a scanning machine present. Below, we’ll walk through connecting in Python.
First, run this command to install the Python SDK:
pip install cloudmersive-ocr-api-clientNext, you can use the below code to call the API. In the middle of the three code snippets below, you’ll need to authenticate your Cloudmersive API key for access — this can be easily attained by creating a free account (good for 800 monthly API calls) on the Cloudmersive website.
from __future__ import print_function
import time
import cloudmersive_ocr_api_client
from cloudmersive_ocr_api_client.rest import ApiException
from pprint import pprint# Configure API key authorization: Apikey
configuration = cloudmersive_ocr_api_client.Configuration()
configuration.api_key['Apikey'] = 'YOUR_API_KEY'# create an instance of the API class
api_instance = cloudmersive_ocr_api_client.ImageOcrApi(cloudmersive_ocr_api_client.ApiClient(configuration))
image_file = '/path/to/inputfile' # file | Image file to perform OCR on. Common file formats such as PNG, JPEG are supported.
recognition_mode = 'recognition_mode_example' # str | Optional; possible values are 'Basic' which provides basic recognition and is not resillient to page rotation, skew or low quality images uses 1-2 API calls; 'Normal' which provides highly fault tolerant OCR recognition uses 26-30 API calls; and 'Advanced' which provides the highest quality and most fault-tolerant recognition uses 28-30 API calls. Default recognition mode is 'Advanced' (optional)
language = 'language_example' # str | Optional, language of the input document, default is English (ENG). Possible values are ENG (English), ARA (Arabic), ZHO (Chinese - Simplified), ZHO-HANT (Chinese - Traditional), ASM (Assamese), AFR (Afrikaans), AMH (Amharic), AZE (Azerbaijani), AZE-CYRL (Azerbaijani - Cyrillic), BEL (Belarusian), BEN (Bengali), BOD (Tibetan), BOS (Bosnian), BUL (Bulgarian), CAT (Catalan; Valencian), CEB (Cebuano), CES (Czech), CHR (Cherokee), CYM (Welsh), DAN (Danish), DEU (German), DZO (Dzongkha), ELL (Greek), ENM (Archaic/Middle English), EPO (Esperanto), EST (Estonian), EUS (Basque), FAS (Persian), FIN (Finnish), FRA (French), FRK (Frankish), FRM (Middle-French), GLE (Irish), GLG (Galician), GRC (Ancient Greek), HAT (Hatian), HEB (Hebrew), HIN (Hindi), HRV (Croatian), HUN (Hungarian), IKU (Inuktitut), IND (Indonesian), ISL (Icelandic), ITA (Italian), ITA-OLD (Old - Italian), JAV (Javanese), JPN (Japanese), KAN (Kannada), KAT (Georgian), KAT-OLD (Old-Georgian), KAZ (Kazakh), KHM (Central Khmer), KIR (Kirghiz), KOR (Korean), KUR (Kurdish), LAO (Lao), LAT (Latin), LAV (Latvian), LIT (Lithuanian), MAL (Malayalam), MAR (Marathi), MKD (Macedonian), MLT (Maltese), MSA (Malay), MYA (Burmese), NEP (Nepali), NLD (Dutch), NOR (Norwegian), ORI (Oriya), PAN (Panjabi), POL (Polish), POR (Portuguese), PUS (Pushto), RON (Romanian), RUS (Russian), SAN (Sanskrit), SIN (Sinhala), SLK (Slovak), SLV (Slovenian), SPA (Spanish), SPA-OLD (Old Spanish), SQI (Albanian), SRP (Serbian), SRP-LAT (Latin Serbian), SWA (Swahili), SWE (Swedish), SYR (Syriac), TAM (Tamil), TEL (Telugu), TGK (Tajik), TGL (Tagalog), THA (Thai), TIR (Tigrinya), TUR (Turkish), UIG (Uighur), UKR (Ukrainian), URD (Urdu), UZB (Uzbek), UZB-CYR (Cyrillic Uzbek), VIE (Vietnamese), YID (Yiddish) (optional)try:
# Convert a photo of a document into text
api_response = api_instance.image_ocr_photo_to_text(image_file, recognition_mode=recognition_mode, language=language)
pprint(api_response)
except ApiException as e:
print("Exception when calling ImageOcrApi->image_ocr_photo_to_text: %s\n" % e)
