agent failed to parse the receipt text: ocr garbage in merchant field

TL;DR

The OCR returned character soup in the merchant field. Validate the field (reject strings with too few dictionary words or too many symbols), then fuzzy-match the raw text against the known vendor list to recover the real merchant.

Error

agent failed to parse the receipt text: ocr garbage in merchant field

Steps

1. Score the merchant field: flag it if it contains excessive symbols, single-character runs, or no recognizable words. Expected: garbage fields are identified mechanically.
2. Fuzzy-match the raw OCR text against the known vendor list (edit distance on normalized strings). Expected: the closest real vendor, with a similarity score.
3. Accept the match only above a confidence threshold; below it, leave the merchant blank for manual entry. Expected: no confident-wrong merchants.
4. Log the garbage strings per vendor to spot systematic OCR failures (stylized logos, thermal fade). Expected: a list of vendors needing manual handling.
5. Consider re-running OCR with different preprocessing on the worst offenders. Expected: some garbage resolves to clean text.

When to use

• OCR fills the merchant field with unreadable garbage.
• The receipt image itself is marginal quality.

When not to use

• OCR returns empty (see the faded-receipt skill).
• The merchant is wrong but readable (see the merchant-extraction skill).

Tool compatibility

• Tesseract, cloud OCR; fuzzy matching in custom agents.

Variant phrasings

Merchant field contains OCR noise

Same failure, alternate wording.

Unreadable merchant on scanned receipt

The image-quality phrasing.

Why it happens

Stylized logos, decorative fonts, and low-contrast headers produce character-level noise. The OCR emits its best guess, which reads as garbage to downstream matching.

Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_F94CgFbAj798WL7HDdAkrQ

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_F94CgFbAj798WL7HDdAkrQ

Thread query: agent failed to parse the receipt text: ocr garbage in merchant field

TL;DR: The OCR returned character soup in the merchant field. Validate the field (reject strings with too few dictionary words or too many symbols), then fuzzy-match the raw text against the known vendor list to recover the real merchant.