High-megapixel smartphone cameras often produce illegible OCR because of thermal paper glare, perspective skew, and motion blur. Follow this 4-step protocol to ensure clean, single-turn extraction.
Thermal receipts use heat-sensitive coating that turns reflective white under a direct LED flash, washing out the tax subtotal and grand total. Always use diffused, ambient overhead lighting or step away from direct point-source lights.
While Apex Forge OCR incorporates automated projection profile deskewing, extreme trapezoidal keystoning distorts character aspect ratios. Hold the camera parallel to the document so all four corners are visible in frame.
Creased receipts break vertical text baselines. Smooth the receipt onto a flat, dark, non-reflective surface to provide maximum edge contrast against the white paper perimeter.
Our pre-processing pipeline computes the variance of the Laplacian transform on every upload. If the variance drops below 100, the image is flagged as blurry to prevent inaccurate extraction. Allow your camera to focus before capturing.
Have a photo ready? Upload it to Apex Forge OCR to test extraction and confidence scoring.
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