Character blacklist/whitelist supported?

[Xargonus]

Hello, is there currently a way to blacklist or whitelist characters used by the text recognition model?

[felixdittrich92]

Hi @Xargonus 👋 ,
My apologies for the late reply,
currently not but feel free to open an issue for this 👍

[SlappyAUS]

This feature is particularly useful in handwriting and form capture. For instance in numeric fields a handwritten "4" outputs as "A". Another issue is bad scans, where paper artefacts can get detected as punctuation.

[frgfm]

Hi @SlappyAUS 👋

I agree but there are two wider topics at hand here:

• the task definition : whether text recognition can use the hypothesis of having no blanks
• handwriting vs typed : handwriting has a difficulty higher than just variability in character style, the spacing and alignments are not fixed. This is a challenge to match with typed ones.

As of right now, we don't support handwriting yet, but we'll have to circle back to this once we do. I suggest checking docTR again once we add handwriting support :)

[frgfm]

Also black/white listing is not exactly possible, there are two fundamental options:
whether the blank is a recognized character or not.

so blacklisting is only possible if the model has blank as a recognized character 🤷‍♂️