This page describes the setup of an independent OCR appliance for use with the Extended DMS environment. DMS will access the OCR appliance and issue commands so that OCR is performed. The advantages are that the DMS appliance's resources (CPU, RAM) are thus not consumed by the OCR processing.

The below instructions describe the setup of the appliance on DMS host machine. Probably it will not affect performance of DMS, because it's only making small http calls to google API, no processing done with these scripts

Components and setup required:

  1. Configure Google Cloud account: enable Google Vision API there and create Google Cloud Storage bucket for temp files created while processing
  2. Configure Google Cloud SDK on DMS host machine
  3. Prepare service account key in JSON format for Google Cloud here: https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials/serviceaccountkey

  4. Save JSON as /opt/gcloud.json

  5. Download pi-gcloud-ocr.jar (Link will be provided after successful testing) to /opt/pi-gcloud-ocr.jar

  6. DMS host needs /<storagepath>/nuxeo/data linked to /var/lib/nuxeo/data and /<storagepath>/nuxeo/tmp linked to /opt/nuxeo/server/tmp

  7. Place the below script with name "pi-google-ocr" to /usr/bin/ and make it executable (chmod +x). This script contains the commands to drive the OCR process for each file.
  8. Place the below script with name "piocr" in /<storagepath>/nuxeo/scripts/ and make it executable (chmod +x). This script contains the commands to access pi-google-ocr script from inside of nuxeo container.
  9. Create ssh key in DMS appliance using "ssh-keygen" command, copy public key (id_rsa.pub) and paste into <<adminuserhome>>/.ssh/authorized_keys file of DMS host vm
  10. Login from DMS appliance to itself using ssh. After successful login, move the DMS appliance's key files "id_rsa", "id_rsa.pub" and "known_hosts" from ~/.ssh/ to /<storagepath>/nuxeo/ssh/ 
  11. Set key "ocr.engine.name" in PAT_DMS_SETTINGS table of Patricia db to "piocr"
  12. Add below change commands to the "commands.conf" file of auto-deploy client specific repository (also found in ~/deploy/config/)
  13. Start re-deploy of DMS using ~/deploy/deploy_script/deploy.sh command as outlined here: Auto-deploy script

Scripts:

#!/bin/bash
gsutil cp "$2" gs://pi-dms-testbucket
input_filename=$(basename $2)
output_filename=$(basename $1)
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/opt/gcloud.json
json=$(java -jar /opt/pi-google-ocr.jar gs://pi-dms-testbucket/$input_filename gs://pi-dms-testbucket/$output_filename)
echo "$json"  > "$1"
gsutil rm "gs://pi-dms-testbucket/$input_filename"
gsutil rm "gs://pi-dms-testbucket/${output_filename}output-1-to-1.json"



#!/bin/bash
echo "variables $1 $2"
ssh <<adminuser>>@<<dms.host.name>> "piocr $1 $2"

$1 is the path and filename of the output file, $2 is the path and filename of the input file that are handed over when the DMS calls the piocr script. The command in piocr script must be such that the OCR engine reads the input file (pointed to by $2) and writes to the output file (pointed to by $1).

Make sure you replace <<adminuser>> with correct user name of an administrative user in OCR appliance, and <<dms.host.name>> with proper FQDN or IP address.


  add_volume "/<storage_path>/nuxeo/ssh" "/home/nuxeo/.ssh"
  add_volume "/<storage_path>/nuxeo/scripts/piocr" "/usr/local/bin/piocr"