Text Extraction from Bills and Invoices

This research tries to find out a methodology through which any data from the daily-use printed bills and invoices can be extracted. The data from these bills or invoices can be used extensively later on - such as machine learning or statistical analysis. This research focuses on extraction of final bill-amount, itinerary, date and similar data from bills and invoices as they encapsulate an ample amount of information about the users purchases, likes or dislikes etc. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is a system that provides a full alphanumeric recognition of printed or handwritten characters from images. Initially, OpenCV has been used to detect the bill or invoice from the image and filter out the unnecessary noise from the image. Then intermediate image is passed for further processing using Tesseract OCR engine, which is an optical character recognition engine. Tesseract intends to apply Text Segmentation in order to extract written text in various fonts and languages. Our methodology proves to be highly accurate while tested on a variety of input images of bills and invoices.