Image OCR Parse
What It Does
Extracts text from images via the PDFAPIHub hosted OCR API. Your image is uploaded to PDFAPIHub servers where Tesseract OCR processes it and returns the extracted text. Supports optional image preprocessing to improve OCR quality on low-resolution or noisy inputs.
When to Use
- Extract text from photos of receipts, signs, or documents
- OCR business cards, ID cards, or labels
- Process low-quality images with preprocessing
Required Inputs
Provide one of:
image_url — URL to an image
base64_image — base64-encoded image
- Multipart upload with
file field
Authentication
This skill calls the PDFAPIHub hosted API at https://pdfapihub.com/api. Your image is uploaded to PDFAPIHub servers for OCR processing.
Send your API key in the CLIENT-API-KEY header.
Get your free API key at https://pdfapihub.com. Full API documentation is available at https://pdfapihub.com/docs.
Privacy note: Images you process are uploaded to PDFAPIHub's cloud service and the extracted text is returned. Do not send sensitive images unless you trust the service. Files are auto-deleted after 30 days.
Use Cases
- Receipt Scanning — Extract text from receipt photos for expense tracking
- Business Card Reader — OCR business card images to extract name, phone, email
- License Plate Recognition — Extract plate numbers from photos (with char_whitelist)
- Meter Reading — Extract digits from utility meter photos for automated logging
- Whiteboard Capture — OCR whiteboard or handwritten note photos into text
- Product Label Scanning — Extract ingredient lists or nutrition info from product label photos
Image Preprocessing Options
| Param | Default | Description |
|---|
grayscale | false | Convert to grayscale |
sharpen | false | Apply sharpening |
threshold | 0 | Binarization threshold (1–255) |
resize | 0 | Scale factor (max 4x) |
Example Usage
curl -X POST https://pdfapihub.com/api/v1/image/ocr/parse \
-H "CLIENT-API-KEY: your_api_key" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"image_url": "https://pdfapihub.com/sample-invoicepage.png",
"lang": "eng",
"grayscale": true,
"sharpen": true,
"detail": "words"
}'