Automating receipt processing with deep learning | Hacker News Reader

Automating receipt processing with deep learning

nanonets.com

129 pointsole_gooner33 comments

What is the point of spamming [1] HN with this low-effort content marketing for Nanonets that barely scratches the surface of the topic but instead is full of obnoxious calls to action?

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/eIhwtjo.png

While I agree this is very clearly an ad, I do very much appreciate the technical parts, very well written

I thought it was a pretty good post details wise. Wouldn't call it "barely scratching the surface"

> Need to digitize documents, receipts or invoices but too lazy to code? Head over to Nanonets and build OCR models for free!

I think that once you go down the path of OCR'ing your own invoices, you better start a company around it.

That's correct. I'm follow this topic since about 10 years now. It seems to be an important issues. But super hard problem. I could not find any close to relatable solution.

Building a company that does only exactly one things, offer an API that takes a receipt as input and returns key/value, is enough.

Gonna be honest, I think it's a dead-end. The solution IMO will come from the supply side; Easier to get receipts digitally from the store / vendor / seller, than to spend all this effort on converting physical receipts to digital.

Sure - there's good retro usage, I'd rather push for sellers to offer you digital receipts.

In fact, I already get that from my local supermarket. My bank card is registered to their app, so every time I swipe my card or scan my app (when paying with cash), I get a receipt on the app, which I can export.

I remember back in college, over 10 years ago, this was a very hot topic. Receipt management was one of those entrepreneur ideas that would always pop up.

> Receipt management was one of those entrepreneur ideas that would always pop up.

Not surprising as it's one of the first things one runs into after starting a company.

> Easier to get receipts digitally

if the need was there you'd already get a qr code to a shortlink to a rest api to fetch the data. existing tech, well defined behavior, augments existing data transfer without being incompatible with the current clients (the squishy humans)

Arn't most of the major retailers already sending the receipt line items to the CC processors? Once folks get more comfortable with realizing this is happening, Visa/Mastercard can start offering receipt organization through their card management apps.

> My bank card is registered to their app, so every time I swipe my card or scan my app (when paying with cash), I get a receipt on the app

That's great but why does this need to be an app? Why can't it be sent via email or have a website I can log into? I'm not downloading an app for every company I want to do business with.

It is not as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of ppl who earn the living by doing the accounting for you and for that they use paper form. Most companies do use and are obliged by legislation to do accounting in paper form too. Paper is here to stay, for a while.

My company has been using Receipt Bank for a few years. God knows what technology they use internally - I don’t care. They have a sweet app that scans receipts and then sucks them into a beautiful back end interface that the book keepers use to align statement items with their backup. Yes, this is a solved problems.

I found it useful, if only for the idea.

My wife has gotten very serious about optimizing the last hay penny out of our expenses, and I'd much rather build her our own receipt ingestion process than use a 3rd party who is reselling our data.

A similar discussion can be found here [1] as well which also got to front page as well. The content is strikingly similar : detail OCR introduction and goes to API introduction.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21626025

I agree with some of the sibling comments -- it's reasonably in-depth with some practical examples.

However, this sort of "content marketing by tweaking submission titles to the same blog repeatedly" posting behaviour would be flagged to oblivion if done by a non-YCombinator funded company...

@Moderator - please see the attached screenshot above and take Strict actions against spammer accounts.

It's a nice overview article for anyone interested in the topic of IE from financial documents. However, for industrial level solutions Tesseract does not cut it. Abbyy is the best OCR engine on the market currently. Receipt IE works just fine with rules supported by a small BiLSTM as fallback just because receipts do not contain a lot of text. With invoices this approach is suboptimal. On a general note no DL approach will give you fast and high enough results just because any advanced network would be too slow and too generic. If extraction takes more than 5 sec. it is hard to sell such system.

Wow Abbyy is 26 years old. Nice to see software that lasts that sort of time.

I remember playing with their OCR (FineReader, I think it was called?) when it came as part of shareware bundles on magazine CDs in the mid-90s...

> On a general note no DL approach will give you fast and high enough results just because any advanced network would be too slow and too generic.

Yeah, but see, I have this shiny hammer, and if I squint just right, everything looks like a nail!

The seasonal trends in the programmer world get kinda tiring after a while, and the people peddling the latest hot new thing equally so, such as this thinly veiled promo piece for nanonets.

In science, there's this concept of falsifiability. If a theory can't be disproven, it's automatically false. The same goes for technological evangelism. If no-one knows what a piece of tech is bad at, how the hell would you know if it's any good at anything, really? There are no panaceas, no one-tool-to-rule-them-all, no single piece of tech that will usher in a new golden age for programmerkind. They're just tools in a toolbox. Know what each tool is good at. Know what each tool is bad at. Don't forget your old tools, just because the newest tool is still very shiny.

Platitudes, I know, but still.

I had abbyy a long time ago and had some uses for it so i went to the website to check out the cost and was met with this monstrosity "Protect your shopping cart downloads with Download Insurance Service. For only £11.00 you will be able to download your files for 24 months, in case you need to reinstall the products. ABBYY Screenshot Reader". Ripoff!!, I've never seen anything like it elsewhere, has anybody else?

it is the market leader and monopolist, this is what you get.

Probably relevant: https://youtu.be/c0O6UXrOZJo

So what is the state of art? Is there a decent software available, that actually works? An app that a small company could use easily, say, for employee expense reports with reliable data parsing and automatic expense/tax calculations?

I've been using waveapps.com. their receipt processor allows me to forward any I get in email via pdf. They have an app to upload a pic as well. Have yet to have an issue. Even the Costco ones that have a line through them. It's been great. And it's "free".

I use waveapps too and I'm pretty sure they're Mechanical Turking their receipt transcription. Sometimes it takes too long for it to be an automated process.

state-of-the-art is commercial :D

Is this dedicated receipt OCR significantly better then the out-of-the box OCR you get from Google Cloud Vision, Abbyy or OCR.space?

As standard OCR gets better and better, the room for specialized OCR solutions is becoming smaller.

OCR is not information extraction. OCR is just the first step in a pipeline.

Sensibill (a former boss designed their system) has done pretty well at interpreting receipts in various formats.

Why does the article title on HN omit the mention of OCR present in the actual title.

Looks like the submitter is trying some A/B testing on getting clicks to their site.

Does anyone know where I can find a receipt dataset?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com