Overview

Sample Reactjs project to use OCR, an Azure cognitive service:

Installation

Clone the repo, then

npm install

Rename .env-sample into .env, and add both values after provisioning "Computer vision" service on your portal.

REACT_APP_BASE_OCR_URL=https://{REGION}.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/vision/v2.0/recognizeText?mode=Printed
REACT_APP_BASE_OCR_SECRET={Key}

Start the server

HTTPS=true npm start

Open a browser, and launch http://localhost:3000

Local OCR service

Microsoft proposes some of the cognitive services as docker images - so that, nothing is sent to Azure (except usage, but no data). This sample project also supports this mode, however, it requires a bit of configuration.

First you need to Request access to the repo that host these images (pick the service you want to use, for this tool, it will be Recognize text)

One thing I have noticed is this container does not set the HTTP headers in order to consume the services from a React app (if you do not know what CORS mean, go there)

Therefore, you will find in this repo a docker-compose configuration file that will allow to start a reverse proxy using Nginx, and make sure headers are set properly.

Make sure Docker is installed, then open a terminal console and navigate to your repo.

Rename docker-compose-sample.yml into docker-compose.yml and set {REGION} and apiKey {APIKEY} according to what you got from the registration

command: Eula=accept Billing=https://{REGION}?.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/vision/v2.0 ApiKey={API-KEY}

In nginx.conf, adapt the port you want Nginx to listen on (default is 8080)

listen 8080;

Start the containers

/> docker-compose up -d

You can now proceed with this application configuration. Edit the .env file, and add the container endpoint, adapting only the port if you modified it in nginx.conf:

REACT_APP_LOCAL_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:8080/vision/v2.0/recognizeText?mode=printed

As you can see, the mode used is printed. As of today (July 2019), this is the only supported mode.

You can now try the OCR Local version!

You just need to launch ocr-reactjs without HTTPS

npm start

Open a browser, and launch http://localhost:3000

Small note

As of today (July 2019) both endpoints (in Azure and in the container) do not share the same input and output parameters. Therefore, this small application makes the distinction between "remote" (in Azure) and "local" (in the container).

Misc

Sample project under MIT - do whatever you want with it :)