A visual transformer-based smart textual extraction method for financial invoices

In era of big data, the computer vision-assisted textual extraction techniques for financial invoices have been a major concern. Currently, such tasks are mainly implemented via traditional image processing techniques. However, they highly rely on manual feature extraction and are mainly developed for specific financial invoice scenes. The general applicability and robustness are the major challenges faced by them. As consequence, deep learning can adaptively learn feature representation for different scenes and be utilized to deal with the above issue. As a consequence, this work introduces a classic pre-training model named visual transformer to construct a lightweight recognition model for this purpose. First, we use image processing technology to preprocess the bill image. Then, we use a sequence transduction model to extract information. The sequence transduction model uses a visual transformer structure. In the stage target location, the horizontal-vertical projection method is used to segment the individual characters, and the template matching is used to normalize the characters. In the stage of feature extraction, the transformer structure is adopted to capture relationship among fine-grained features through multi-head attention mechanism. On this basis, a text classification procedure is designed to output detection results. Finally, experiments on a real-world dataset are carried out to evaluate performance of the proposal and the obtained results well show the superiority of it. Experimental results show that this method has high accuracy and robustness in extracting financial bill information.