OCR Preprocessing API: Detect and Unskew a Photo of a Document with JavaScript

Photos taken with cell phone cameras are prone to becoming skewed. That isn’t a big deal –unless you’re thinking of performing an OCR operation on that photo, or trying to convert it into a PDF. To accomplish either of those operations quickly and cleanly, you should take advantage of our Unskew OCR Preprocessing API, which will turn a skewed image into a perfectly square image. You can then perform OCR directly on the photo or convert to PDF first and then use that document in a suitable OCR operation instead.

Connecting to this API is easy — below, we’ve provided instructions to include ready-to-run code snippets for structuring your API call with JavaScript. On the Cloudmersive API Console page, you’ll find similar code snippets available in a dozen of the most commonly used programming languages.

Let’s start by installing the jQuery library, which we can do by running the below command:

bower install jquery

Then we can add in a code snippet which will capture the image file for the operation:

var form = new FormData();
form.append("imageFile", fileInput.files[0], "file");

Now there’s only one step left — add in the below code for the API call, and you’re all done:

var settings = {
     "url": "https://api.cloudmersive.com/ocr/preprocessing/image/unskew",
     "method": "POST",
     "timeout": 0,
     "headers": {
          "Content-Type": "multipart/form-data",
          "Apikey": "YOUR-API-KEY-HERE"
     },
     "processData": false,
     "mimeType": "multipart/form-data",
     "contentType": false,
     "data": form
};
$.ajax(settings).done(function (response) {
     console.log(response);
});

You’ll need to include your Cloudmersive API key where indicated in the code above. To get a key, head to our website (Home — Cloudmersive APIs) and create a free account. With your free account, you’ll get a limit of 800 API calls per month, with access to dozens of similar Cloudmersive utility APIs.