DocView OmniRead on its own

DocView OmniRead is the recognition engine of DocView Capture, and a product of its own. Installed on its own, it reads documents for any application in your organisation, on your own hardware:

Printed text (OCR) in 50 languages, with the position and confidence of every line and word.
Handwriting (ICR), in zones or across the page.
Barcodes and QR codes.
A vision-language model that answers questions about a document, such as "What is the invoice number and the total?"
Image clean-up: straightening, noise removal, binarisation, line removal.

Nothing leaves your network: the models run on the server's processor, without a cloud service or a graphics card. Applications call it over HTTP with JSON and an API key.

Install it

Run DocView Setup on the server and choose DocView OmniRead (standalone). Setup asks for:

Page	What it asks
DocView OmniRead	An instance name, only for a second or further OmniRead on the same computer (empty: the standard one; a name such as `B` installs another with its own service, port and settings), the port (5300; 5301 suggested for an instance), whether applications on other computers use it (it then listens on the network and Windows Firewall allows the port), and whether to download the recognition models now (about 0.2 GB; the vision model is about 1.5 GB more).
Administrator	The user name and password for OmniRead's admin page.
Licence	Start with the 30-day evaluation, or a licence file you already have for this server.

Setup installs the Windows service DocView OmniRead and ends with the address of the admin page and the installation ID.

Offline servers: answer no to downloading the models, and copy the model folder (C:\ProgramData\DocViewCapture\OmniRead\models) from another installation, or download the models later on the admin page.

The admin page

Open http://<server>:5300/admin and sign in. (If Setup did not make an administrator, open http://localhost:5300/admin on the server itself: the first visit there makes one.)

Tab	What it is for
Overview	Requests today and in the last 30 days, refused requests, the engines and their models, the licence.
API keys	One key per application: make, see when each was last used, withdraw.
Try it	Read an image, as an application would: printed text, text with handwriting, barcodes, or a question for the vision model.
Models	Download the OCR models and the vision model; see which engines are ready.
Licence	The installation ID and the licence; install a licence file.
Account	Change the administrator's password.

API documentation opens /docs: every operation, its fields, examples in curl, Python, C# and JavaScript, and the answers. The machine-readable description is at /openapi.json (OpenAPI 3), for tools that generate clients.

Connect an application

On API keys, type the application's name and select Make a key. Copy the key (it starts with dvo_): it is shown only once.
In the application, send requests to http://<server>:5300/v1/… with the key in the X-Api-Key header, and the image as base64 in JSON.

For example, printed text from invoice.png:

IMAGE=$(base64 -w0 invoice.png)
curl http://ocr01:5300/v1/ocr -H "X-Api-Key: $OMNIREAD_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"image":"'"$IMAGE"'","languages":["eng"]}'

The answer has the text, and every line and word with its box and confidence. See /docs for handwriting, barcodes, questions to the vision model and image clean-up.

To stop an application, Withdraw its key: its requests are refused at once.

Licence

DocView OmniRead is licensed per server. Without a licence it runs fully for 30 days from its first start. After that, applications' requests are refused (answer 402) until a licence is installed; the admin page keeps working.

On Licence, copy the installation ID.
Send it to Dev Soft UK (sales@docview.ai) for the licence file of this server.
Choose the .dvlic file under Licence file and select Install.

A DocView Capture licence does not work here, nor a DocView OmniRead licence in DocView Capture. Requests from DocView Capture (signed with its own key) are covered by DocView Capture's licence.

With DocView Capture too

The same service can also work for DocView Capture: install it from DocView Capture's Administration › Downloads (it is then connected by itself), or add its address under Settings › DocView OmniRead in DocView Capture. Applications with API keys and DocView Capture can use it at the same time. See DocView OmniRead.

Good to know

Several servers: install OmniRead on each and spread your applications over them (or put a load balancer in front). A busy service answers 429: try again or send to another one.
Where things are kept: the program in C:\Program Files\DocView OmniRead, its administrator, API keys, licence and usage in C:\ProgramData\DocViewCapture\OmniRead\data (keep it in your backups), logs in C:\ProgramData\DocViewCapture\OmniRead\logs.
Security: API keys are kept only as hashes; the admin page's password as a salted hash. Use HTTPS in front of the service (a reverse proxy) when requests cross networks you do not trust.
From the command line (as an administrator, on the server): DocViewOmniRead.exe installation-id, DocViewOmniRead.exe licence <file>, DocViewOmniRead.exe set-admin --user admin (the password from the environment variable OMNIREAD_ADMIN_PASSWORD), DocViewOmniRead.exe download-models [--vlm]. Stop the service first for set-admin and licence, and start it again afterwards.