A Novel Implementation of Marksheet Parser Using PaddleOCR
This work addresses a domain-specific issue for online application systems in India, but it is incremental as it builds on existing OCR methods with minor enhancements.
The authors tackled the problem of automatically extracting marks from uploaded marksheets for online applications by building a parser using PaddleOCR, achieving improved accuracy over existing PyTesseract-based solutions, though specific numbers are not provided.
When an applicant files an online application, there is usually a requirement to fill the marks in the online form and also upload the marksheet in the portal for the verification. A system was built for reading the uploaded marksheet using OCR and automatically filling the rows/ columns in the online form. Though there are partial solutions to this problem - implemented using PyTesseract - the accuracy is low. Hence, the PaddleOCR was used to build the marksheet parser. Several pre-processing and post-processing steps were also performed. The system was tested and evaluated for seven states. Further work is being done and the system is being evaluated for more states and boards of India.