Smart OCR Skill

Overview

This skill enables intelligent text extraction from images and scanned documents using PaddleOCR - a leading OCR engine supporting 100+ languages. Extract text from photos, screenshots, scanned PDFs, and handwritten documents with high accuracy.

How to Use

1. Provide the image or scanned document
2. Optionally specify language(s) to detect
3. I'll extract text with position and confidence data

Example prompts:

• "Extract all text from this screenshot"
• "OCR this scanned PDF document"
• "Read the text from this business card photo"
• "Extract Chinese and English text from this image"

Domain Knowledge

PaddleOCR Fundamentals

from paddleocr import PaddleOCR

# Initialize OCR engine
ocr = PaddleOCR(use_angle_cls=True, lang='en')

# Run OCR on image
result = ocr.ocr('image.png', cls=True)

# Result structure: [[box, (text, confidence)], ...]
for line in result[0]:
    box = line[0]      # [[x1,y1], [x2,y2], [x3,y3], [x4,y4]]
    text = line[1][0]  # Extracted text
    conf = line[1][1]  # Confidence score
    print(f"{text} ({conf:.2f})")

Supported Languages

# Common language codes
languages = {
    'en': 'English',
    'ch': 'Chinese (Simplified)',
    'cht': 'Chinese (Traditional)',
    'japan': 'Japanese',
    'korean': 'Korean',
    'french': 'French',
    'german': 'German',
    'spanish': 'Spanish',
    'russian': 'Russian',
    'arabic': 'Arabic',
    'hindi': 'Hindi',
    'vi': 'Vietnamese',
    'th': 'Thai',
    # ... 100+ languages supported
}

# Use specific language
ocr = PaddleOCR(lang='ch')  # Chinese
ocr = PaddleOCR(lang='japan')  # Japanese
ocr = PaddleOCR(lang='multilingual')  # Auto-detect

Configuration Options

from paddleocr import PaddleOCR

ocr = PaddleOCR(
    # Detection settings
    det_model_dir=None,         # Custom detection model
    det_limit_side_len=960,     # Max side length for detection
    det_db_thresh=0.3,          # Binarization threshold
    det_db_box_thresh=0.5,      # Box score threshold
    
    # Recognition settings
    rec_model_dir=None,         # Custom recognition model
    rec_char_dict_path=None,    # Custom character dictionary
    
    # Angle classification
    use_angle_cls=True,         # Enable angle classification
    cls_model_dir=None,         # Custom classification model
    
    # Language
    lang='en',                  # Language code
    
    # Performance
    use_gpu=True,               # Use GPU if available
    gpu_mem=500,                # GPU memory limit (MB)
    enable_mkldnn=True,         # CPU optimization
    
    # Output
    show_log=False,             # Suppress logs
)

Processing Different Sources

Image Files

# Single image
result = ocr.ocr('image.png')

# Multiple images
images = ['img1.png', 'img2.png', 'img3.png']
for img in images:
    result = ocr.ocr(img)
    process_result(result)

PDF Files (Scanned)

from pdf2image import convert_from_path

def ocr_pdf(pdf_path):
    """OCR a scanned PDF."""
    # Convert PDF pages to images
    images = convert_from_path(pdf_path)
    
    all_text = []
    for i, img in enumerate(images):
        # Save temp image
        temp_path = f'temp_page_{i}.png'
        img.save(temp_path)
        
        # OCR the image
        result = ocr.ocr(temp_path)
        
        # Extract text
        page_text = '\n'.join([line[1][0] for line in result[0]])
        all_text.append(f"--- Page {i+1} ---\n{page_text}")
        
        os.remove(temp_path)
    
    return '\n\n'.join(all_text)

URLs and Bytes

import requests
from io import BytesIO

# From URL
response = requests.get('https://example.com/image.png')
result = ocr.ocr(BytesIO(response.content))

# From bytes
with open('image.png', 'rb') as f:
    img_bytes = f.read()
result = ocr.ocr(BytesIO(img_bytes))

Result Processing

def process_ocr_result(result):
    """Process OCR result into structured data."""
    
    lines = []
    for line in result[0]:
        box = line[0]
        text = line[1][0]
        confidence = line[1][1]
        
        # Calculate bounding box
        x_coords = [p[0] for p in box]
        y_coords = [p[1] for p in box]
        
        lines.append({
            'text': text,
            'confidence': confidence,
            'bbox': {
                'left': min<