A barcode can usually survive one missing element. Individual heating elements burn out all the time when they do, they leave a visible white column. Thermal receipt printers work by using a linear array of heating elements – as the paper moves past the print head, an element is turned on-then-off to print a dot. But no receipt printer has the quality to print the high resolution QR barcode needed. With overhead, that’s room for about a 20 item receipt. QR codes can hold a finite amount of data, about 3K max on a really high density array.
#Squareup receipts software
Emailing receipts is possible for some retailers who have software to do it AND who track your purchases via loyalty number or something (if they’re tracking it via your account number, that falls into a privacy “gray area”.) Making your receipts available via API is possible, but few retailers offer it.Īnd making the raw receipt data available via QR code is almost impossible, due to the amount of data. Given the state of IT of most retailers, a printed copy is only possible because their register software produced it. Posted in digital cameras hacks, Software Hacks Tagged api, ocr, optical character recognition, receipt, scanner Post navigation While there’s still some edge cases that need chasing down, he’s using the software on a nearly daily basis, and has posted it up on GitHub for anyone who might wish to build on his efforts.
The unique challenges of digitizing large amounts of printed content using OCR makes for some fascinating problem solving, and we’re glad shared this particular story with us. It also makes it much easier to tell which images need to be scanned - if there’s no QR code found, the software just skips that shot and keeps looking. This greatly improves the reliability of the image rotation and transformation, which in turn makes the OCR more reliable. He came up with a QR code marker that he could put on the table with the receipt to be scanned, which his software can use as a known point of reference. In the end, realized that the best way to handle the unreliable condition of the receipts was to focus on a different object in the image. The promising proof of concept that worked a treat under controlled conditions failed completely in the real-world, with reporting that only 1 in 5 receipts he tried to scan actually went through.
It’s one thing to capture data from perfectly clean and flat receipts, but quite another to get any useful info out of one that spent half the day crumpled up in your back pocket. Using a QR code as reference point.īut like so many horror films that begin with a happy family starting a new life in a beautiful home, there was a monster lurking in the shadows. With this information, writing up some Python code to push his captured data into the service was trivial. He was then able to decipher the API for Splitwise, an online service for splitting bills, by capturing the data sent by his browser while adding a new bill. The code could detect the edges of the receipt, rotate the captured image appropriately, and then pull out the critical information such as date, total amount, business name, etc. It only took an evening to hack together a rough demo, and the initial results were very promising. We’re happy he stuck with it though, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading about it on Hackaday, and we wouldn’t be able to learn anything from the detailed account he’s provided. But in reality it took so much time to troubleshoot and implement that he says it would have been faster to just enter in all his receipts by hand. That’s what thought when he set out to create his homebrew “Receipt Ingestion” system, anyway. There are companies that offer such a service, so it can’t be too difficult to replicate on your own…right? It’s one of those things that certainly sounds simple enough: take a picture of a receipt, run it through optical character recognition (OCR), and send the resulting information to whatever expense-tracking website or software you wish.
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