How to use the Oxford OCR API with Powershell

Mon, 29 Jun 2015 00:00:00 -0700

I recently had a need to use OCR on an existing image, and a teamate suggested using the new Oxford APIs. This was a result of my afternoon quick hack, but rolled up into a Powershell cmdlet that could be reused by others.

Setting up the Oxford APIs for use

To quickly get up to speed, I followed the descriptions here which outline the steps as:

Select the API you wish to use
- I navigated to Computer Vision APIs and selected the “Sign Up” button.
This will bring up the Azure portal, select the marketplace you will have to option of naming your service, I chose VisionApi The “purchase” is free, and shows up as an Azure Marketplace offering. (Note that you may need to scroll down the listing of services in the Azure portal.
When you are presented with the “dashboard” for the marketplace, select the “Manage” option
You will now see your subscriptions with key information hidden. Select Show and copy your new OxfordKey.

Now that we have the service side setup, we will use the Oxford.ps1 script from psoxford. Easiest way to get this is to clone the repo, which will also get you our test images.

Ocr on ZBrad's Blog

How to use the Oxford OCR API with Powershell

Setting up the Oxford APIs for use