IQ Bot 11.x: Selecting an OCR engine

You can select different OCR engines from the UI to see what best suits your requirements for data extraction based on your document types. A stop and restart of IQ Bot services is not required for implementing an engine change.

During IQ Bot installation, the system sets the latest version of Tesseract Optical Character Reader as the default OCR engine. This is also the global setting for the product.

However, you can manually set the OCR engine in the Settings.txt file, which becomes the default engine. Similar to the prior releases of IQ Bot, you can continue to manually update the Settings.txt file with the OCR engine name you want to set as default.

If you select a deprecated version of the OCR engine or a non-supported engine through the Settings.txt file configuration, the system displays an error message. When creating a learning instance, you can select an OCR engine from the Optical Character Recognition drop-down menu. See IQ Bot 11.x: Create a learning instance
Note: Selecting an OCR engine overrides the values in the Settings.txt file.

Procedure

  1. On the Create a new learning instance page, select the domain and language of the documents.
    In the My learning instance list page, a new OCR Engine column is available that shows the OCR engine used for creating each learning instance. This information is useful to the user when deciding on document processing.
  2. The Fields to extract and Advanced Settings sections are displayed when you select the domain.
    Each domain is available with a predefined list of primary supported languages. Language selection is enabled and available from the Primary language of documents drop-down list based on supported languages for a specific domain.
    Note: If you select a language from the Primary language of documents drop-down list and then select an engine that does not support that language, the system displays an error message in the Optical character recognition drop-down list.
  3. Click Advanced Settings > Optical character recognition to display the OCR engine options drop-down list.

    If the OCR engine selection is invalid, the Create instance and analyze option is not enabled.

    Note: IQ Bot automatically installs all OCR engines during the installation process, except for ABBYY FineReader Engine.
    Important: You can only configure the selected OCR engine in Automation 360 IQ Bot On-Premises. OCR settings in Automation 360 IQ Bot Cloud cannot be edited as they are not accessible except for ABBYY FineReader Engine. You can edit the configuration settings for ABBYY FineReader Engine using the appConfigurations REST API.

    You can select from the following:

    OptionDescription
    Tesseract OCR4 This is the default engine, unless changed in the Settings.txt file.
    ABBYY FineReader Engine

    To verify if ABBYY FineReader Engine is installed and available for use on your machine, check the Settings.txt file, the OCR Plug-ins folder for the SDK files, and the Optical character recognition drop-down list.

    Note: Also supported in IQ Bot [Local Device] package and IQ Bot Extraction package.

    Use ABBYY FineReader Engine OCR engine in IQ Bot 11.x

    Microsoft Azure Computer Vision OCR engine IQ Bot supports all languages supported by this OCR engine.

    IQ Bot 11.x: Use Microsoft Azure Computer Vision OCR engine

    Google Vision API IQ Bot supports Google Vision API as an OCR engine and supports all languages supported by this engine.

    IQ Bot 11.x: Use Google Vision API OCR engine

    Tegaki API IQ Bot supports his OCR engine to extract data specific to Japanese and Korean language documents. You need to download and use your private license to use Tegaki API.
    Note: Tegaki API OCR engine is not supported in Automation 360 IQ Bot Cloud.

    IQ Bot 11.x: Use Tegaki API OCR engine

    My PDF documents do not have images

    All the PDF documents that you upload are processed using the PDFBox OCR by default, regardless of the OCR engine you have specified or selected.

    If you are uploading non-PDF documents or PDF documents that contain images, clear the My PDF documents do not have images check box to ensure that the OCR engine that you have specified or selected is used to process the documents.

    The My PDF documents do not have images check box is enabled by default. To disable this feature, see IQ Bot 11.x: Disable PDFBox option.
    Tip: If IQ Bot is unable to extract data from low quality or handwritten documents, troubleshoot the issue:

    IQ Bot unable to extract data from low quality and Handwritten documents (A-People login required)