Question

I need to extract/crop the logotype (BEAVER) in the middle from a TIFF file that looks like this: http://i41.tinypic.com/2i7rbie.jpg

And then I need to automate the process so it can be repeated about 9 million times…

My guess is that I would have to use some OCR software. But is it possible for such a software to “crop anything that starts below this point and ends above this point”?

Thoughts?

Answer 1

Typically OCR software does only extraction of text from images and conversion of it into some text-specific format. It does not do crop. However, you can use OCR technologies to achieve your task. I would recommend following:

• OCR whole page
• Get coordinates of recognized text
• Apply your magic rules to recognized text to locate area to crop: such as averything in between “application filled” and “STATEMENT” sentences.
• Cut from image that area and export it where you want it.

Real challenge is in the amount of text you would like to process. You have to be very carefull when defining your “smart rules” to make sure they don’t provide false positives and always send suspicious images to separate queue that you will later manually review and update your rules.

In general it may look like this:

• Take first 10 of images, define logo detection rules, test and see if everything works well
• Then run on next 10, see what was prcessed wrong, what was not processed, update rules, re-process those 10 to make sure everything works well now
• Re-run it on new batches of same size until it will start working well.
• Then increase batch size from 10 to 100, and go with those batches until again everything start working smoothly
• Then continue this way perfecting your rules and increasing batch size. At some point of time you will go to production speed.

Most likely you will encounter some strange images that either contradict existing rules, or just wrong. Not always you have to update your rules to accomodate it. It may happen that there it only dozen of images like that in whole your 9 million collection. It might be better to leave them in exceptions queue for manual processing, and don’t risk stability of your magic rules.