- Problem: deepseek-v4-flash is text-only, cannot process base64 images - hallucinated fake data
- Solution: Two-step pipeline that actually extracts real data:
1. Tesseract OCR extracts raw text from the receipt image
2. DeepSeek v4 parses the OCR text into structured JSON
- Benefits: works with any image format, fast, accurate, no hallucinated data
- Properly handles HEIC/HEIF via heif-convert before OCR