Benchmarking OCR Pipelines with Adaptive Enhancement for Multi-Domain Retail Bill Digitization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive adaptive OCR pipeline for retail bill digitization across multiple domains, significantly improving accuracy and speed over baseline methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel, integrated OCR system with adaptive enhancement, quality analysis, and NLP correction, benchmarked on a diverse real-world retail dataset.

Findings

Achieved 18.4% CER and 27.6% WER, improving over baseline by over 26%.

Reduced processing time to 3.64 seconds per image, 6.4x faster than EasyOCR.

Enhanced image quality with an average PSNR of 28.7 dB on medium and low-quality images.

Abstract

The digitization of multi-domain retail billing documents remains a challenging task due to variability in scan quality, layout heterogeneity, and domain diversity across commercial sectors. This paper proposes and benchmarks an intelligent, quality-aware adaptive Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline for retail bill digitization spanning five domains: grocery stores, restaurants, hardware shops, footwear outlets, and clothing retailers. The proposed system integrates a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based image enhancement module trained via self-supervised denoising, a Laplacian variance-based image quality analyzer with three-tier routing, a confidence-driven adaptive feedback loop with iterative retry, and an NLP-based post-OCR correction layer. Experiments were conducted on a real-world dataset of 360 heterogeneous retail bill images. Ground truth for quantitative evaluation was generated using an OCR ensemble majority voting strategy, a validated approach for scenarios without manual annotation. The proposed pipeline achieves a Character Error Rate (CER) of 18.4% and Word Error Rate (WER) of 27.6%, representing improvements of 26.4% and 31.2% respectively over the Raw Tesseract baseline. The pipeline additionally achieves a text density of 108.3 words per image, a noise ratio of 2.3%, and a processing time of 3.64 seconds per image - a 6.4x speed advantage over EasyOCR. Image quality PSNR analysis on enhanced MEDIUM and LOW quality images yields an average of 28.7 dB, confirming meaningful enhancement. These results establish a reproducible benchmark for multi-domain retail bill OCR research.