Image document processing in a client-server system including privacy-preserving text recognition

Abstract

Disclosed are devices and methods for processing an image document in a client-server environment such that privacy of text information contained in the image document is preserved. Specifically, in a client-server environment, an image document can be processed using a local computerized device of a client to create an obfuscated document by identifying word images in the image document and scrambling those word images. The obfuscated document can be received by a server of a service provider over a network (e.g., the Internet) and processed by previously trained software (e.g., a previously trained convolutional neural network (CNN)) to recognize specific words represented by the scrambled images in the obfuscated document without having to reconstruct the image document. Since the image document is neither communicated over the network, nor reconstructed and stored on the server, privacy concerns are minimized.