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Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#51

Post by ocrcustomserver »

danso wrote: post #2

Given 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…

There's Google Cloud Vision and Microsoft Cognitive Services that act as competitors to Amazon Rekognition, but AFAIK there's no offering from a FAANG that competes with AWS Textract.

It looks like it's competing with ABBYY (FlexiCapture) and Kofax.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#52

Post by ocrcustomserver »

kayhi wrote: post #36
tracker1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think less about books, and more about automating input from forms filled out by hand. In working with this tech, I can say that none of it is great and it would be very nice to be able to ditch what's available for stuff that would work better. For my employer's use case, the data storage and privacy implications are a non-starter.

Wonder if they will offer a local solution.

Shameless plug: I work on custom solutions that do this locally, shoot me an email if interested.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#53

Post by ocrcustomserver »

cmroanirgo wrote: post #19

Found some interesting tidbits in their FAQ [0]: "Q: What type of text can Amazon Textract detect and extract? A: Amazon Textract can detect Latin-script characters from the standard English alphabet and ASCII symbols." So, English only. But very worryingly is that they're going to keep your companies' documents: "Q. Are document and image inputs processed by Amazon Textract stored, and how are they used by AWS? A: A…

As tracker1 mentioned, don't think of this as for reflowing text for different devices but as a data capture and documents processing solution.

Example: You are dealing with a lot of PDF documents that contain unstructured information (e.g. a filled form) and you need to extract bits of information (e.g. name, address) and output it in a structured format (e.g. JSON/XLS).

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#54

Post by njstraub608 »

Ftuuky wrote: post #23
Edmond wrote: post #17

Not sure if this is bad news for the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) sector or an opportunity to offload the "Robotic" part while focusing on business process...

There are many RPA solutions with OCR as part of the automation.

Generally, these are stuffed in there for marketing and aren't very effective when used in actual business scenarios.

Source: I do a lot of post-sales consulting work implementing RPA solutions.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#55

Post by njstraub608 »

Holybeds wrote: post #8
efields wrote: post #7

Is 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.

This ^^

And actually understanding the context of what you're trying to use OCR on can work backward to determine what the text actually is, i.e. if it's a "Name" field then the probabilities of ambiguous letters may change (in the case of handwriting rec).

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#56

Post by ocrcustomserver »

This is very interesting. I'm curious to see how they will execute on several points:

1. How it will deal with multiple templates that the system hasn't seen before. Especially when there is significant difference between the templates.

2. UI/UX. E.g. how it will trace the extracted data to the original source and how it will show the confidence scores of each entity.

3. Verification process, how will the workflow look like when the confidence score is low and the document has to be checked by human operators.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#57

Post by viig99 »

efields wrote: post #7

Is 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…

No open source ocr doesn't work that great, i work for a telecom company, and we process over millions of documents a month, we built everything in house and now are able to process it at almost 40cents per 1000 documents. It a long process to process huge documents like payslips which require text boundary detection, word identification, spatial clustering and writing parsers (depends on word, segment, and clustering probabilities) which can extract required fields out of the documents.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#58

Post by mjt58 »

cdolan wrote: post #46
mjt58 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried e.g. https://tabula.technology , https://pdftables.com , https://pypi.org/project/Camelot/ ?

Rather than the Camelot link you provided, I think you meant Excalibur? https://github.com/camelot-dev/excalibur

Oh yes, thanks :-)

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#59

Post by acqq »

tills13 wrote: post #21
cmroanirgo wrote: post #19

Found some interesting tidbits in their FAQ [0]: "Q: What type of text can Amazon Textract detect and extract? A: Amazon Textract can detect Latin-script characters from the standard English alphabet and ASCII symbols." So, English only. But very worryingly is that they're going to keep your companies' documents: "Q. Are document and image inputs processed by Amazon Textract stored, and how are they used by AWS? A: A…

The point of this service is to train their own OCR models for use in other products like Kindle / their e-book store. There doesn't really need to be a value add - if people use it it's a win for them... if people don't it's not really a big loss.

But in order to train something you have to have the input of what is actually there, I don’t see how that is provided here.

Re: Amazon Textract – Extract text and data from virtually any document

#60

Post by BasHamer »

cdolan wrote: post #45
BasHamer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

handled the non-printed whitespace but butchered the multi- line table headers, so re-building the headers is rough as it is line by line and you need to know what words go together and you have lost the structure.

Can you send me a copy of what you are trying to extract? We use proprietary stuff (we're in the business of extracting data and performing analysis on invoices for waste, recycling, cellular, etc... stuff that gets "lost" in the AP department. Happy to see if our tools can help. I've tried everything on the market - DocParser, MediusFlow, KOFAX, Ephesoft, etc... none work well enough in my opinion.

I should be able to get you some files, getting approval now; can you let me know how to contact you?
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