From Photo to Study Schedule: How Timetable OCR Works
By Zakariae Alliouate
Every semester starts the same way: a timetable screenshot buried in your camera roll, and a planning app waiting for structured data. OCR bridges that gap — here is how.
Step 1 — Photo Cleanup
The image is upscaled, denoised and binarized (Otsu, adaptive and inverted variants) so text survives bad lighting, faded prints and phone-camera blur. Histogram equalization rescues low-contrast scans.
Step 2 — Grid Detection
Morphological operations find the table's horizontal and vertical lines. Each cell is cropped with padding and white borders, then read individually by Tesseract in French and English — cell-by-cell reading beats whole-image reading for tables.
Step 3 — Header Parsing
Day names (Lundi/Monday, Mardi/Tuesday…) identify columns; time patterns like 08:30 or 8h30 identify rows. Missing end-times are inferred from the next row's start time.
Step 4 — Merge and Validate
Two fallback strategies (full-text parsing, column-based extraction) cover gridless timetables. Results are deduplicated, sorted by day and time, and validated — day names as "labels" and unknown times are rejected automatically.
Tips for a Perfect Scan
- Straight angle, good light — perspective skew is the #1 accuracy killer.
- Fill the frame — the timetable should occupy most of the photo.
- PDF beats photo — export from your school portal when possible.
Upload to TimiX and your busy blocks appear in seconds — the foundation every AI plan is built on.
Frequently asked questions
Can I scan my timetable with my phone camera?
Yes. Take a straight, well-lit photo of your timetable (PNG or JPG) or export a PDF, upload it to TimiX, and OCR extracts classes, days and times automatically in about 30 seconds.
How accurate is timetable OCR?
Clean, high-contrast timetables extract with very high accuracy. TimiX runs three strategies — grid detection, full-text parsing and column analysis — then merges and validates results to handle messy real-world photos.
What if my timetable has no clear grid?
Use manual paint mode: mark busy hours on a 7-day grid by hand, or let the AI builder generate free slots from your wake-up time and availability answers instead.