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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

#61

Post by cdolan »

BasHamer wrote: post #60
cdolan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I changed my about to have a phonetic spelling of my email address, hosted on a very popular domain name. Feel free to toss me an email

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

#62

Post by VvR-Ox »

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…

Keeping documents and analyzing your business is not new and will not keep people from using it in their companies I'm afraid. At least it doesn't stop people from Using Windows and other M$ products.

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

#63

Post by Technetium_Hat »

acqq wrote: post #59
tills13 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There might be a way for users to rate the quality of the result, or at least report it if it is very wrong.

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

#64

Post by gingerlime »

ocrcustomserver wrote: post #47
gingerlime wrote: post #9

I 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…

In tesseract, if you want to recognize both English and German you can use option -l deu+eng . If you want to perform language detection you can do the following: a. Invoke tesseract with "-l eng". b. Pass the output text to langdetect [1]. It is a port of Google's language detection library to Python which will give you the probabilities of the languages for a given text. c. Invoke tesseract with "-l langdetect_outp…

Thanks. Wasn't aware it is possible to combine languages!

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

#65

Post by gingerlime »

lokl wrote: post #14
gingerlime wrote: post #9

I 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 don't absolutely need the integration/CLI, I recommend FineReader (Standard edition). You can specify that the document can contain text from a set of languages (e.g., German and English) and it will auto-detect appropriately. If you need automation (of import, processing, export), this can be done with FineReader Server (formerly known as Recognition Server), but the pricing is quite high for personal use. Fi…

I've heard good things about FineReader, but I'm using Linux and it doesn't look like it's available, also to automate the scanning workflow (and I can't really justify spending that much of it).

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

#66

Post by gingerlime »

RandomBookmarks wrote: post #27
gingerlime wrote: post #9

I 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…

You can try the free ocr api at https://ocr.space/ocrapi

Looks interesting, but the free limitations are too restrictive unfortunately (3 page limit, 1 Mb), and I cannot justify paying this much for the paid option when I probably scan roughly less than 10 documents per month (which can be longer than 3 pages and larger than 1 Mb).

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

#67

Post by ocrcustomserver »

gingerlime wrote: post #65
lokl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't absolutely need the integration/CLI, I recommend FineReader (Standard edition). You can specify that the document can contain text from a set of languages (e.g., German and English) and it will auto-detect appropriately. If you need automation (of import, processing, export), this can be done with FineReader Server (formerly known as Recognition Server), but the pricing is quite high for personal use. Fi…

I've heard good things about FineReader, but I'm using Linux and it doesn't look like it's available, also to automate the scanning workflow (and I can't really justify spending that much of it).

There's ABBYY FineReader Engine CLI for Linux: https://www.ocr4linux.com/

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

#68

Post by ocrcustomserver »

Some videos that were just released:

Announcing Amazon Textract, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHX7q4pMGbo

Introducing Amazon Textract: Now in Preview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hagvdqofRU4

Introducing Amazon Hieroglyph: Now in Preview (AIM363), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnZFK_2oqKk

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

#69

Post by bpchaps »

sbarre wrote: post #43

So this is Apache Tika as a Service? https://tika.apache.org/

A little late to the comment party, but I was wondering the same. I'm working on a web scrape workflow that's currently using Tika. I'm very interested in to see how well this does in comparison.

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

#70

Post by sbarre »

bpchaps wrote: post #69
sbarre wrote: post #43

So this is Apache Tika as a Service? https://tika.apache.org/

A little late to the comment party, but I was wondering the same. I'm working on a web scrape workflow that's currently using Tika. I'm very interested in to see how well this does in comparison.

I was quite surprised by how powerful and flexible Tika can be, and my use-case was pretty basic: crawling a network drive to index project artifacts like Office docs and media files and pushing them into an Elasticsearch index.

Have you found any major problems or shortcomings in your usage?

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