reading-business-cards

Reading Business Cards

Turn photos or scans that pack many business cards into one image into a clean contact list. The job is two stages, in order: preprocess with the script, then read the tiles it produces. Read the tiles, not the original sheet — the original is too low-resolution per card once the model downscales it.

Why preprocess first

The model downscales any input image to ~1568px on the long edge before it sees it. A phone photo of 50-60 cards is often 4000-6000px; downscaled to one image, each card lands ~150px wide — unreadable, which forces you onto a more expensive model. The script cuts the sheet into overlapping tiles, each near the downscale cap (~1300px), so every card in a tile keeps 500px+ of real resolution. That resolution recovery is what lets a cheaper model (Sonnet) read cards that only the expensive one (Opus) could read before — and it lets Opus read cards from far fewer tiles. The grid is sized to the reader model (see Stage 1): pass --model and the script tiles aggressively for Haiku, moderately for Sonnet, and least for Opus, because a stronger reader has a lower resolution floor. The floor is set by the pixels, not the model's intelligence: at ~220px/card (a whole dense sheet) even Opus reads only company and some names, not phone/email — so even Opus needs a few tiles for fine print on dense sheets.

De-glaring (illumination flattening + local contrast) is applied to each tile. It corrects uneven lighting and the haze off glossy cards and plastic binder sleeves. It cannot recover text where glare has clipped pixels to pure white — that data is gone (see Limits).

Stage 1 — Tile the sheets

The person only provides the images and the goal ("read these cards"). Derive every parameter yourself; do not ask them to choose grid sizes or flags.

Real sheets are messy: cards scattered at angles, packed in binder sleeves, overlapping, piled. Detecting individual card boundaries fails on all of these. Tiling ignores card boundaries — it slices the sheet into a grid of overlapping rectangles. Each tile holds a few cards at high resolution; the overlap means a card split by one tile's edge is whole in its neighbour.