Automating Receipt Digitization with OCR and Deep Learning

Receipt digitization addresses the challenge of automatically extracting information from a receipt. In this article, I cover the theory behind receipt digitization and implement an end-to-end pipeline using OpenCV and Tesseract. I also review a few important papers that do Receipt Digitization using Deep Learning. Receipts carry the information needed for trade to occur between companies and much of it is on paper or in semi-structured formats such as PDFs and images of paper/hard copies. In order to manage this information effectively, companies extract and store the relevant information contained in these documents. Traditionally this has been achieved by manually extracting the relevant information and inputting it into a database which is a labor-intensive and expensive process. Receipt digitization addresses the challenge of automatically extracting information from a receipt. Extracting key information from receipts and converting them to structured documents can serve many applications and services, such as efficient archiving, fast indexing and document analytics.