agent's receipt parser broke with error on crumpled thermal paper

TL;DR

Crumpled thermal paper defeats both OCR and layout parsing: shadows, folds, and distorted text. Preprocess with perspective correction and shadow removal, and when parsing still fails, capture what is readable and send the receipt to manual review instead of crashing.

Error

agent's receipt parser broke with error on crumpled thermal paper

Steps

1. Catch the parser exception per receipt so one bad image cannot kill the run. Expected: the failure is isolated to the single receipt.
2. Apply geometric preprocessing: detect the receipt edges, correct perspective, and remove shadows from folds. Expected: a flattened, evenly lit image.
3. Re-run OCR and parsing on the corrected image. Expected: partial or full extraction where the raw image failed.
4. If key fields are still unreadable, store the best-effort extraction plus the image, flagged for manual review. Expected: a human completes what the parser could not.
5. Advise submitters to flatten thermal receipts before photographing (a book for a few minutes works). Expected: fewer crumpled submissions over time.

When to use

• The agent's parser errors on crumpled, folded, or shadowed receipts.
• One bad receipt crashes or stalls the whole run.

When not to use

• The receipt is flat but faded (see the faded-receipt skill).
• The parser works but extracts wrong values (see the OCR-correction skill).

Tool compatibility

• Tesseract, cloud OCR, and custom receipt-parsing pipelines.

Variant phrasings

Parser failed on damaged receipt

Same failure, generic wording.

Could not parse crumpled receipt image

Names the physical cause directly.

Why it happens

Parsers assume roughly rectangular, evenly lit text lines. Folds break line segmentation and shadows break binarization, so the layout analysis fails before recognition even starts.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_KhxOhaINepZwB5cJNzxIFA

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_KhxOhaINepZwB5cJNzxIFA

Thread query: agent's receipt parser broke with error on crumpled thermal paper

TL;DR: Crumpled thermal paper defeats both OCR and layout parsing: shadows, folds, and distorted text. Preprocess with perspective correction and shadow removal, and when parsing still fails, capture what is readable and send the receipt to manual review instead of crashing.