OCR Annotation tool

See how you can automatically annotate images for OCR on Mindkosh

To label images for OCR, simply add an attribute to your labels with the text type, when creating a task. If you already have the task created, you can also edit it, and add new attributes to existing labels.

If you want to enter multiple entries for each label, you can also add multiple attributes of text type to the same label.

Add a Text type attribute to a label to enable OCR annotation

Once the attribute has been added, you can draw bounding boxes over text, and enter free-form text in the attribute. To do this you have a few options:

1. Once the object has been drawn, right click on the annotation, and enter the text in the attribute text box at the bottom of the pop-up.

2. You can also do this through the object annotation cards in the right sidebar. If you don't see the attribute in the card, click the Details button to expand the attributes section.

1. If the text you want to enter is long, and does not fit in the small text box, you can bring up the text entry window by clicking on the three dots (...) to the right of the attribute text box.

   

Automatic OCR annotation

To access Automatic OCR, you need credits which can be purchased separately. Each automatically annotated image consumes 1 credit. To buy credits, get in touch with our sales team at [e-mail]

To automatically detect and label all text in your images:

The auto-annotate dialog box for OCR

1. Click on the Run automatic OCR button on the task page.

2. This will open up the label selection window.

   1. Detect lines - This will detect all text in form of lines. This is suitable for labeling documents, invoices etc, where text is mostly written as lines. You also need to select what label this text will be assigned, and in which attribute, the text value will be saved.

   2. Detect tokens - This will detect all text in form of tokens (words). This is suitable for labeling road signs, small blocks of text etc.

   3. You can also choose to label both. Be careful of doing this, as it will increase the number of objects added to the images, and you might need to remove a lot of unnecessary annotations.

   4. Choose the label which the bounding boxes around text will be assigned.

   5. Choose the attribute (property) where the text will be saved.

3. Depending on the number of images, it might take a few minutes to an hour to process the task. You can check the progress of the annotation on the task page.

If you choose to automatically label both lines and tokens, it can be a good idea to use filters to reduce the number of annotations visible on the page. You can apply filters by clicking on the filter icon in the right sidebar. You can learn more about how to use filters here.

You can also use the Merge bounding boxes tool to merge multiple annotations into a single bounding box. The text values are also copied when you merge. You can use this to, for e.g. quickly merge different lines of an address, into a single address object.

Merge annotations