A Robust Framework for Coffee Bean Package Label Recognition: Integrating Image Enhancement with Vision–Language OCR Models

Text recognition on coffee bean package labels is of great importance for product tracking and brand verification, but it poses a challenge due to variations in image quality, packaging materials, and environmental conditions. In this paper, we propose a pipeline that combines several image enhancement techniques and is followed by an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model based on vision-language (VL) Qwen VL variants, conditioned by structured prompts. To facilitate the evaluation, we construct a coffee bean package image set containing two subsets, namely low-resolution (LRCB) and high-resolution coffee bean image sets (HRCB), enclosing multiple real-world challenges. These cases involve various packaging types (bottles and bags), label sides (front and back), rotation, and different illumination. To address the image quality problem, we design a dedicated preprocessing pipeline for package label situations. We develop and evaluate four Qwen-VL OCR variants with prompt engineering, which are compared against four baselines: DocTR, PaddleOCR, EasyOCR, and Tesseract. Extensive comparison using various metrics, including the Levenshtein distance, Cosine similarity, Jaccard index, Exact Match, BLEU score, and ROUGE scores (ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L), proves significant improvements upon the baselines. In addition, the public POIE dataset validation test proves how well the framework can generalize, thus demonstrating its practicality and reliability for label recognition.