~camwebb/labelai

Web app using AI to OCR and parse herbarium specimen labels

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#Label AI

Simple web app using AI to OCR and parse herbarium specimen labels

This script provides a simple HTML UI to access the EdenAI APIs. It uses: i) Google to OCR an image (deals with handwriting well), ii) (optionally) Google to translate the OCR text into English, and iii) OpenAI’s Generative Text AI (related to ChatGPT) to parse the OCR into Darwin-Core-ish fields. These are loaded into a HTML form where they can be edited. Finally, a tab-delimited text string can copied and pasted into text editor and opened by a spreadsheet/DB.

Touch-up interface

As input, the app can either take a ID (e.g., a Museum accession number) and use a lookup table from IDs to Image URLs, or a directly uploaded image. The former permits the app to be run on a local machine. Using the latter requires a public webserver with server write-permission to a directory in which the uploaded images are stored.

Note: If you put this app on a public server, and do not want to subsidize the public with your payments to EdenAI, use Basic Authentication to password protect the site.

#Installation

This script is a quick hack and you might do better to rewrite something similar with your platform of choice. But it does work.

  • Dependencies: Gawk and gawkextlib, with the Json extension. On Arch Linux, packages gawk, gawkextlib (AUR) and gawk-json (AUR). Plus an HTTP web server, e.g., Apache.
  • Clone the repo somewhere the web server can see and execute the directory
  • $ cp .htaccess.template .htaccess
  • If using Basic Authentication, create a password file with htpasswd
  • Edit .htaccess as needed (e.g., to set password file or disable Auth)
  • Get an EdenAI account and API key
  • $ cp pw_template.awk pw.awk
  • Add the API key to pw.awk, and the relative path of a web-readable, server-writable directory where the uploaded images can be stored.
  • Make that directory: $ mkdir ../aiimg && chmod a+w ../aiimg (../aiimg is an example)
  • (optionally) Create a space-delimited, two column lookup table: ID URL called guid2url

#Acknowledgments

Thanks to Debbie Paul for pointing me to a Github thread where she asked ChatGPT to parse label text into JSON, and also for pointing me to the TDWG Slack #ai channel, where I see others (Rod Page, Rukaya) have also been experimenting.

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