Optical character recognition in Directus

Directus Deno API

How to use OCR using TTA in Directus.

Using OCR inside of Directus

Leverage TTA's OCR interface to seamlessly integrate text recognition for PDFs and images within Directus.

The interface will allow you to use OCR on 3 places:

OCR result

After using an OCR option on a file, a popup with an image preview will appear.

This window can be dragged around your screen for convenience.

Using the OCR Result

The preview will display a highlighted area with the recognized text.

You can click on the text to make a selection.
After selecting, click on any input field to fill it with the selected text.

Multiple pages in a PDF

When using PDFs with multiple pages, you can navigate through the pages using the arrows at the bottom of the preview.
These will only be visible when the PDF has more than one page.

Using OCR inside of Directus Flows

Use TTA's OCR operation to optical character recognition into Directus Flows. It works with images and PDF`s and extracts the text from them based on FileID.
It supports the following response types:

Text
HOCR (HTML like structure)
Blocks

Operation Settings

Inside of the operation you have the following options:

Option	Description
File ID	The ID of the file you want to process.
Mode	Can be either 'text', 'hocr' or 'blocks'.
Language	Pick a language for the OCR process.

Output

The output of the operation depends on the mode you selected. The output will be a string with the text or a JSON object with the blocks or hocr data. You can open the extensions tab to see how the JSON object is structured.

Using OCR in your own Directus extension

const result = await globalThis.TTA.OCRBasedOnAsset(
      fileID,
      language, // for example eng for english
      mode // can be text, horc or blocks
);

Output

The output of the operation depends on the mode you selected.

The output will be a string with the text or a JSON object with the blocks or hocr data.

Example of the blocks output

[{
  'bbox': {
    'x0': 34,
    'y0': 48,
    'x1': 563,
    'y1': 717
  },
  'text': 'Invoice mycompany@example.com\nEi a\n\nDirectus shares 1 $100 $100\n...',
  'confidence': 85,
  'blocktype': 1,
  'paragraphs': [
    {
      'bbox': { 'x0': 34, 'y0': 48, 'x1': 563, 'y1': 90 },
      'text': 'Invoice mycompany@example.com\nEi a\n\n',
      'confidence': 45,
      'is_ltr': 1,
      'lines': [ /* ... */ ]
    }
  ]
}]