Google Cloud: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Tutorial

by

Learn how to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on Google Cloud Platform. This tutorial demonstrates how to upload image files to Google Cloud Storage, extract text from the images using the Google Cloud Vision API, translate the text using the Google Cloud Translation API, and save your translations back to Cloud Storage. Google Cloud Pub/Sub is used to queue various tasks and trigger the right Cloud Functions to carry them out.

Objectives

  • Write and deploy several Background Cloud Functions.
  • Upload images to Cloud Storage.
  • Extract, translate and save text contained in uploaded images.

Visualizing the flow of data

The flow of data in the OCR tutorial application involves several steps:

  1. An image that contains text in any language is uploaded to Cloud Storage.
  2. A Cloud Function is triggered, which uses the Vision API to extract the text and detect the source language.
  3. The text is queued for translation by publishing a message to a Pub/Sub topic. A translation is queued for each target language different from the source language.
  4. If a target language matches the source language, the translation queue is skipped, and text is sent to the result queue, another Pub/Sub topic.
  5. A Cloud Function uses the Translation API to translate the text in the translation queue. The translated result is sent to the result queue.
  6. Another Cloud Function saves the translated text from the result queue to Cloud Storage.
  7. The results are found in Cloud Storage as txt files for each translation.

It may help to visualize the steps:

Filed Under: links Tagged With: , , , , , , ,