Define the visual setting
Text on a package, a street sign, and a photographed page present different layouts and capture conditions. Specify which settings matter and whether the model needs transcription, localization, or both. Distinguish natural scene text from scanned pages and synthetic renderings. Combining them may be useful, but the source types should remain visible in the metadata.
Write transcription conventions
Decide how case, punctuation, line breaks, reading order, and partially obscured characters are represented. An unreadable word should not become a confident guessed transcript. Include a way to mark illegible or uncertain spans. For multilingual material, specify what evidence is needed to label language and whether transliteration belongs in a separate field rather than replacing the visible writing.
Inspect the delivered pixels
Glare, curved surfaces, perspective, small character size, and compression can all affect readability. Review the source image at the intended processing size. If text regions are supplied, render them over the exact delivered image and verify that crops do not remove required context. Keep transformed versions linked to originals so evaluation results can be interpreted consistently.
Avoid hidden content assumptions
Photographed text may contain personal, confidential, or third-party material. Include the project exclusions and documentation requirements in the sourcing brief rather than assuming public visibility resolves intended-use questions. A pilot should test both transcription consistency and content suitability. Fiund reviews prospective sourcing and commercial terms per project; a category inquiry is not a ready-to-download licensed OCR collection.
Review checklist
- Specify scene text, documents, or both.
- Define transcription and uncertainty conventions.
- Review legibility after intended preprocessing.
- List sensitive-content exclusions for project review.