In this article, we will introduce our top 10 OCR Receipt, how to choose and access the right engine according to your data.
What is OCR Receipt?
What does OCR Receipt do?
OCR Receipt is a tool powered by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract and digitalize meaningful data from scanned or PDF receipts. Fields commonly captured by OCR receipt include description, quantity, due date, line items, merchant and store information, unit price, bill to, receipt number, total amount, tax amount, etc.
This technology is built on multiple steps :
The first step consists of preprocessing the image, usually the scanned receipts are noisy so a preprocessing with noise removal and gray scaling are needed. This step is necessary for the text extraction engines to work well.
Next step is text detection with OCR. It extracts a text from various file types: PDF, DOCX, JPEG, PNG, etc. Their goal is only to get the texts in the document without dealing with the structure of the document.
The final step consists of data extraction and categorization, where it classifies the extracted text into keys and tags like tax and total amount, it's based on deep learning algorithms and NER (Named Entity Recognition).
The final result of the parsing is a structured form that can be readable by the computer. It’s often a JSON, XML or even a CSV file; this makes it easy to be stored into a database and automatically analyzed.
A brief history of OCR Receipt methods
OCR traces its roots back to telegraphy. On the eve of the First World War, physicist Emanuel Goldberg invented a machine that could read characters and convert them into telegraph code. In the 1920s, he went a step further and created the first electronic document retrieval system.
Early versions of OCR had to be trained with images of each character and were limited to recognising one font at a time. In the 1970s, inventor Ray Kurzweil commercialised “omni-font OCR”, which could process text printed in almost any font.
OCR Technology became popular in the early 1990s while attempting to digitize historic newspapers. In the early 2000s, OCR became available online as a cloud-based service, accessible via desktop and mobile applications.
Today, there’s a host of OCR service providers offering technology (often accessible via APIs) capable of recognising most characters and fonts to a high level of accuracy.
Top 10 OCR Receipt APIs
1. Base64 - Available on Eden AI
Base64.ai is a cloud-based artificial intelligence service that instantly and accurately extracts text, data, handwriting, photos, and signatures from all types of documents, including IDs, driver licenses, passports, visas, receipts, invoices, forms, and hundreds of other document types worldwide. In seconds, Base64.ai discerns the document's type, extracts the relevant information, verifies the results, and integrates them into the customer's systems.
2. Dataleon - Available on Eden AI
Dataleon provides the best Machine Learning tools for data automation and processing. Ready-to-use API for data recognition and extraction are available to accelerate digital transformation powered by artificial intelligence. To resolve in the best way company’s issues, Dataleon develops innovative automation and adjustable solutions available in the cloud with AI.
3. Klippa
Klippa offers data & AI consulting and AI-powered SaaS solutions for automating your administrative tasks and workflows based on documents and images. Klippa offers solutions for scanning, expense management, invoice processing, KYC, loyalty, logistics, and back-office automation. These solutions are available as an end-to-end solutions, but also as RPA components, APIs and SDKs.
4. Microsoft Azure - Available on Eden AI
Microsoft Azure offers an OCR service as part of its Computer Vision API, which can be used to extract text from receipt images. The API can recognize text in different languages, as well as handwriting, and return structured data such as the total amount and date of the receipt. In addition, it can also extract key-value pairs from the receipt. This allows developers to easily integrate the receipt recognition functionality into their applications and automate tasks such as expense tracking and accounting.
5. Mindee - Available on Eden AI
Mindee helps software product teams build lightning-fast, accurate, and robust document processing automation features in their applications. Their API gives developers access to state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms for document parsing through an easy-to-use and developer-centric platform.
The full extraction process is performed without any humans in the loop, allowing you to offer real-time experience with a maximum level of data privacy. Mindee’s algorithms don’t need to read all the document text in its language to extract the relevant information.
6. Rossum
Rossum solves four key steps in document-based processes at once: receiving documents across multiple channels, automated understanding, two-way communication to resolve exceptions, and acting on the data using in-depth integrations. In typical real-world scenarios, Rossum’s proprietary AI engine outranks narrow data extraction solutions in accuracy. Meanwhile, Rossum’s platform automates the document-based communication process end-to-end. Rossum’s goal for every use case is at minimum a 90% document processing speed increase.
7. TabScanner - Available on Eden AI
Tabscanner provides receipt OCR technology with a cloud-based receipt OCR API for use in software. Useful for instant analysis of accurate data, Tabscanner is a receipt OCR technology with the ability to read more receipt fields. Tabscanner claims to be the only technology capable of returning accurate lines from any receipt in the world.
8. Taggun
Taggun provides a receipt OCR API that extracts data from receipts and invoices. TAGGUN's intelligent API uses Machine Learning, and is easy for developers to integrate into existing software. Their technology works as a highly customisable receipt & invoice OCR API to companies who require a fast, accurate and scalable solution.
9. Veryfi
Veryfi uses its innovative AI software to provide Intelligent Document Processing. Veryfi AI is pre-trained to extract and transform unstructured data from receipts, invoices, purchase orders, checks, W2s and other business documents into structured data, in seconds, without a human in the loop. Trusted by enterprises and technology companies alike, Veryfi’s AI-based platform is currently in use at hundreds of organizations worldwide.
10. Xtracta
Xtracta provides AI-powered data extraction software and OCR solutions to help your organization with all kinds of document automation. Powered by artificial intelligence, Xtracta technology automatically extracts information and captures data from documents, whether they are scanned, photographed, or digital. The technology can be embedded into virtually any software application via our easy-to-use API.
Some OCR Receipt API use cases
OCR receipt can be used in many areas as it is the backbone of many businesses, especially in the area of supply chain management as it streamlines and optimizes various processes. Digitizing inbound data allows companies to manage tasks, information and production more efficiently and control costs. This digitization also improves on-time delivery, as manual data entry can lead to delays and inaccuracies throughout the supply chain.
Automating the capture and management of receiving data with OCR technology results in substantial time and efficiency savings, making it a critical aspect of a successful supply chain strategy.
Why choose Eden AI to manage your APIs
Companies and developers from a wide range of industries (Social Media, Retail, Health, Finances, Law, etc.) use Eden AI’s unique API to easily integrate OCR Receipt tasks in their cloud-based applications, without having to build their own solutions.
Eden AI offers multiple AI APIs on its platform amongst several technologies: Text-to-Speech, Language Detection, Sentiment analysis API, Summarization, Question Answering, Data Anonymization, Speech recognition, and so forth.
We want our users to have access to multiple OCR Receipt engines and manage them in one place so they can reach high performance, optimize cost and cover all their needs. There are many reasons for using multiple APIs:
Fallback provider is the ABCs
You need to set up a provider API that is requested if and only if the main OCR Receipt API does not perform well (or is down). You can use confidence score returned or other methods to check provider accuracy.
Performance optimization.
After the testing phase, you will be able to build a mapping of providers performance based on the criteria you have chosen (languages, fields, etc.). Each data that you need to process will then be sent to the best OCR Receipt API.
Cost - Performance ratio optimization.
You can choose the cheapest OCR Receipt provider that performs well for your data.
Combine multiple AI APIs.
This approach is required if you look for extremely high accuracy. The combination leads to higher costs but allows your AI service to be safe and accurate because OCR Receipt APIs will validate and invalidate each other for each piece of data.
How Eden AI can help you?
Eden AI has been made for multiple AI APIs use. Eden AI is the future of AI usage in companies. Eden AI allows you to call multiple AI APIs.
Centralized and fully monitored billing on Eden AI for all OCR Receipt APIs
Unified API for all providers: simple and standard to use, quick switch between providers, access to the specific features of each provider
Standardized response format: the JSON output format is the same for all suppliers thanks to Eden AI's standardization work. The response elements are also standardized thanks to Eden AI's powerful matching algorithms.
The best Artificial Intelligence APIs in the market are available: big cloud providers (Google, AWS, Microsoft, and more specialized engines)
Data protection: Eden AI will not store or use any data. Possibility to filter to use only GDPR engines.
You can see Eden AI documentation here.
Next step in your project
The Eden AI team can help you with your OCR Receipt integration project. This can be done by :
Organizing a product demo and a discussion to better understand your needs. You can book a time slot here: Contact
By testing the public version of Eden AI for free: however, not all providers are available on this version. Some are only available on the Enterprise version.
By benefiting from the support and advice of a team of experts to find the optimal combination of providers according to the specifics of your needs
Having the possibility to integrate on a third-party platform: we can quickly develop connectors