Comparative analysis of Tesseract and Google Cloud Vision for Thai vehicle registration certificate

Abstract

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a technology to digitize a paper-based document to digital form. This research studies the extraction of the characters from a Thai vehicle registration certificate via a Google Cloud Vision API and a Tesseract OCR. The recognition performance of both OCR APIs is also examined. The 84 color image files comprised three image sizes/resolutions and five image characteristics. For suitable image type comparison, the greyscale and binary image are converted from color images. Furthermore, the three pre-processing techniques, sharpening, contrast adjustment, and brightness adjustment, are also applied to enhance the quality of image before applying the two OCR APIs. The recognition performance was evaluated in terms of accuracy and readability. The results showed that the Google Cloud Vision API works well for the Thai vehicle registration certificate with an accuracy of 84.43%, whereas the Tesseract OCR showed an accuracy of 47.02%. The highest accuracy came from the color image with 1024×768 px, 300dpi, and using sharpening and brightness adjustment as pre-processing techniques. In terms of readability, the Google Cloud Vision API has more readability than the Tesseract. The proposed conditions facilitate the possibility of the implementation for Thai vehicle registration certificate recognition system.