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by alexcnwy 2402 days ago
It’s surprising to hear you were getting good results with Python OCR libraries 10 years ago because there aren’t any reliable Python OCR libraries even today! ‘:) Tesseract is very fickle and doesn’t work well in poor lighting conditions (like a nightclub)

What deep learning gives you that’s really useful and valuable (beyond better OCR) is that you can use graph convolutional networks to automatically parse the OCR output and convert it into structured data. You could hand-write a parser or use a template matching approach but you’ll have to create a new parser/template for every ID card type whereas the GCN approach can be used to learn the parser