image-converter-service

Project status

I use this project to learn new technologies related to spring boot web. I change this project constantly improving and adding new plugins, click here to follow up.

The Problem

I needed to transform an image with a bill number code to a text in order to use it on other software. Yes, Google has/had a service for that, but you have to pay :(

About

This project converts images with text into simple text using tesseract and exposes it as a web service using spring boot.

Basically, the caller sends a request (post) with an image with text, and the project tries to find the text on this image, returns it as text, and stores the conversion on a database.

Basic overall architecture:

For more information plese check the project development site.

Technologies

• Git
• Java
• Maven
• Spring Frameworks (boot, data, security, Open API, etc.)
• Tesseract
• Docker

Requirements

These are the requirements:

• Git

# check the git version
git --version

• Java version >= 17

# check the Java version
java --version

• Ant version >= 1.10 (optional)

# check the Ant version
ant -version

• Maven version >= 3.8.8

# check the Maven version
mvn --version

• Docker

# check the Docker version
docker --version

• Newman (for tests)

# check the Newman version
newman --version

How to Execute

To execute, please folow these steps:

Get parent's project

This project use the allset-java parent maven project to use plugins and configurations.

Please get this project and install it on your repository before continuing.

Get extension's project

This project use the default-extensions to use plugins configurations (checkstyle-checks.xml, pmd-ruleset.xml, spotbugs-excludes.xml, etc).

To install

Please get this project and install it on your repository before continuing.

To start, clone it:

git clone https://github.com/fernando-romulo-silva/image-converter-service

You have to be in the project's root directory:

cd image-converter-service

Build the application:

mvn package -DskipTests

To Execute

Using Docker

It is recommended to use this process because using docker you don't need to install and configure tesseract on your pc:

docker build --build-arg BUILD_DATE=$(date -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ') \
             --file src/main/docker/Dockerfile \
             --tag image-converter-service .

To run the project:

docker run --publish 8080:8080 \
           --publish 8000:8000 \
           --detach \
           --memory 1Gb \
           --memory-reservation 256Mb \
           --name image-converter-service-1 \
           --env-file src/main/docker/AlpineVersion.env \
           --log-opt mode=non-blocking \
           --log-opt max-buffer-size=16m \
           image-converter-service

Using Java Local

Tesseract needs a dictionary and the application uses the English dictionary called 'eng.traineddata.' For example, Ubuntu Ubuntu Linux (22.04.2 LTS) and tesseract 4, the default dictionary is installed on /usr/share/tesseract-ocr/4.00/tessdata/ and Alpine linux (3.15.0) and tesseract 4, the default dictionary is installed on /usr/share/tessdata/

You have to check where the dictionary was installed on your S.O.

First, define where the dictionary folder was installed:

export TESSERACT_FOLDER=/usr/share/tesseract-ocr/4.00/tessdata/

Next check if tesseract is working:

tesseract --version

Then execute:

mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring.profiles.active=local

Testing the application

There is a Postman collection that you can use to test it, but you can use Newman. To do that, execute the following command inside the project folder to test:

newman run src/test/resources/postman/image-converter-service.postman_collection.json \
          -e src/test/resources/postman/image-converter-service-local.postman_environment.json

API Documentation

To access the API's documentation:

http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui/index.html?configUrl=/v3/api-docs/swagger-config