Receipts2Go: the big world of small documents

Abstract

The Receipts2Go system is about the world of one-page documents: cash register receipts, book covers, cereal boxes, price tags, train tickets, fire extinguisher tags. In that world, we're exploring techniques for extracting accurate information from documents for which we have no layout descriptions -- indeed no initial idea of what the document's genre is -- using photos taken with cell phone cameras by users who aren't skilled document capture technicians. This paper outlines the system and reports on some initial results, including the algorithms we've found useful for cleaning up those document images, and the techniques used to extract and organize relevant information from thousands of similar-but-different page layouts.