Best practices for capturing Documents using Veryfi mobile camera solution
4 focus areas:
Document Distance – the distance between your phone’s camera and receipt,
Image Quality – that’s the quality of receipts captured and
Location Services – GPS, Wifi & Cell towers confusion.
App Access – your camera if you want to snap receipts.
1. Document Distance
To improve the quality of Veryfi’s detection technology; during scan, move the phone back and forth away from the receipt until you see the green container envelope your receipt (as pictured). After a while you will have a better feel for the way the system works.
2. Image Quality
Veryfi parses images you feed it through the collect view. So the better the quality of those images the higher the chance our machine-powered backend will understand all the data on your document.
Here are a few tips on how to achieve great image quality:
Hold the phone (camera) steady as you press the button to take a picture. Blur is often caused by motion when taking a photo. And blur is also caused when you camera (phone) slows the shutter automatically to compensate for poor light.. this leads to the 2nd point.
Use simple or black background to place the receipt on before capturing it. This helps improve the receipt detection. Receipt detection yields a cropped image which in turn improves the accuracy of the OCR.
Light helps with picture clarity or a very steady hand. This is why tripods are used in dim places or at night. Taking photos indoors without a DSLR camera or an external light source is often tricky. You only get around 300-800 LUX of light indoors. Where you cannot get enough light (like indoors), flip the light on your phone using this button or move to a brighter light source.
3. Location Services
GPS, on the phone, is a often used in the wrong context. For example, GPS only works outdoors. Not indoors. Yet people refer to GPS indoors when in fact what they really mean is “Location”. Location might be the more fairer word to use when referring to how accurately your phone can identify its latitude and longitude.
Your phone is super smart. It uses what’s called Fusion Location Services to make sense of it’s where it is in the world. Fusion means that a combination of the 3 technologies mentioned below will be used to accurately locate you.
How to optimize for best location identification?
1. Make sure that Location Services is ON. Navigate to Settings > Location Services > ON and that you have allowed Veryfi to Location Services.
2. If you are indoors taking a photo of your receipt, then using the cheat sheet above you want to make sure that WiFi is turned on your phone (see screenshot to the left).
3. If you are outdoors, make sure that you are in clear sight of the sky. This is the ultimate pin point accuracy.
We hope these 2 tips on Image & Location will allow you to capture receipts with perfect accuracy.
4. App Access
The following are located in your phone’s “General > Settings > Veryfi”.
At a minimum, please allow Veryfi to access your “Camera”. Without this setting you will not be able to take photos of your receipts.
We also recommend you set “Location” to “While Using” for the reasons mentioned above.
A closer look at Veryfi Lens options
Settings
AutoDoc Detect&Cro
If AutoDoc Detect&Cro is not working for you you can turn it Off and use the manual crop.
Auto Blur Detection
Detects blur in photos taken in low light or without the light on. Please note that blur affects the accuracy of data extraction.
Auto Torch
Turning this On gives you a Lights button on the main scan view so you can control the light
Handsfree Document Capture
Let Image detection identify, focus, and capture the document automatically
Configuration
Back up to Photo Gallery
Secondary backup to your mobile device gallery for all your documents
After Scan Close Camera
Turning this Off allows you to scan documents one by one without being transferred to the Documents insights screen
Collect Upfront
If enabled allows you to preset Category, Tag, Project, Cost code or Notes