Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
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Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#2Given how high and continuing the popularity of the "simple" conversion
of regular PDF forms/tables -- even for the technically-sophisticated HN audience [0] -- if Amazon can deliver on OCR-to-data, that feels like a huge achievement. Not as sexy (or creepy) as Rekognition, perhaps, but almost certainly more day-to-day useful to the many, many professionals who work with documents and legacy data entry systems.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pdf%20convert&sort=byPopularit...
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#3This looks a lot like what I've seen from companies such as InstaBase[1]. Given how hard it is to do well (largely due to poor initial images), I'm curious how Amazon's product offering will work.
I a team I'm working with had a lot of success doing this, curious what method(s) they are using.
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#4Given how high and continuing the popularity of the "simple" conversion of regular PDF forms/tables -- even for the technically-sophisticated HN audience [0] -- if Amazon can deliver on OCR-to-data, that feels like a huge achievement. Not as sexy (or creepy) as Rekognition, perhaps, but almost certainly more day-to-day useful to the many, many professionals who work with documents and legacy data entry systems. [0] h…
Agreed. Anything that can lighten the load of having to write custom scripts to handle pdf-to-data conversions will be helpful.
I do maintain some level of skepticism though. It is ocr :D
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#5Any idea if this can support handwriting even with a reduced confidence? Support for non-English languages?
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#6Given how high and continuing the popularity of the "simple" conversion of regular PDF forms/tables -- even for the technically-sophisticated HN audience [0] -- if Amazon can deliver on OCR-to-data, that feels like a huge achievement. Not as sexy (or creepy) as Rekognition, perhaps, but almost certainly more day-to-day useful to the many, many professionals who work with documents and legacy data entry systems. [0] h…
Agreed. Anything that can lighten the load of having to write custom scripts to handle pdf-to-data conversions will be helpful. I do maintain some level of skepticism though. It is ocr :D
Even if AWS goes the cynical route of making Textract be an upsell to MTurk -- e.g. the Textract output is not reliable enough on its own, but structured for easy piping to a MTurk job -- that's got to be useful for the many folks who send entire pages to MTurk when they just need a couple boxes proofread.
As an example of a more scripted/structured job, ProPublica built out a crowdsourcing framework in Rails to extract data from FCC filings. But even that was quite difficult, because every state/TV station has its own kind of form: https://projects.propublica.org/free-the-files/
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#7Is off the shelf open source OCR not reliable for an image of reasonable fidelity, like a smartphone camera picture of a B&W text document?
I ask because it feels like I should have an app that lets me scan with my phone, process the text with OCR, then let me plain text search every scanned document I have.
The first part only natively made it into iOS Notes a year or two ago, but that whole experience above should be out of the box, IMHO…
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#8Is off the shelf open source OCR not reliable for an image of reasonable fidelity, like a smartphone camera picture of a B&W text document? I ask because it feels like I should have an app that lets me scan with my phone, process the text with OCR, then let me plain text search every scanned document I have. The first part only natively made it into iOS Notes a year or two ago, but that whole experience above should…
There's a difference between doing OCR and actually understanding what is what in the document content.
For normal text OCR works well. But automatically understanding what is what is more complex.
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#9I have a personal flow using tesseract to scan docs into searchable PDFs, but it’s not that accurate. One of the main problems is that some (now most?) of the documents are in German since I live in Germany, but some are in English. There’s a way to choose the language but nothing to auto detect as far as I’m aware. I was hoping for some cloud AI service with superior OCR and simple integration or CLI (push a PDF and download one with OCR embedded). Google seems to be too complicated unfortunately... Any tips??
Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document
#10I have a personal flow using tesseract to scan docs into searchable PDFs, but it’s not that accurate. One of the main problems is that some (now most?) of the documents are in German since I live in Germany, but some are in English. There’s a way to choose the language but nothing to auto detect as far as I’m aware. I was hoping for some cloud AI service with superior OCR and simple integration or CLI (push a PDF and…
If you're running tesseract locally (i.e. not paying per invocation), run it once with EN and count occurrences of the/this/a/any etc, run it again with DE and count occurrences of der/die/das/um/ab/wie, and go from there?
Edit: Hell, even average word length is probably going to be a good indicator since German is so agglutinative. Collect some factors like this and I think you'll be able to build a pretty good classifier.