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With all the progress in machine learning it seems like there should be an amazing OCR tool that works out of the box for structured documents. Does it exist?
by appleflaxen 9y ago
With all the progress in machine learning it seems like there should be an amazing OCR tool that works out of the box for structured documents.
Does it exist?
I've used tesseract and its relatives, but they seem to have a hard time with any document that's not a single column. The difference between what they can achieve (which to be fair is amazing) with what I expected based on all the ML demos that only does the first 10% (numbers only, no structure), but does it in a 30-minute demo, is big. Things like affine transforms (scaling, rotation) and decorations like bold, underline, and weird fonts create even more problems.
Why isn't there a docker container with an AWS lambda function in it that takes any image format I upload (pdf, png, jpg as the most critical) and returns a UTF string of its content?
My god, I'm spoiled by technology.
- zzleeper 9y agoAgreed. What I do for tables is use the OCR as a step 1, where I just extract the coordinates of each textbox. Then, use one of several methods to recognize columns (Hough transform, or we search for empty areas). Then, do some clustering to recognize lines. The problem is that there's a million of edge cases that you need to handle (split boxes that span multiple columns, in the case of tables recognize cells that span multiple columns or rows, etc.). There should be a solution for all these edge cases, but it gets tricky quickly.
- GCU-Empiricist 9y agoHaving worked on some of these questions, then there comes the question of logical flow, how do you order that inset square of text at the bigger font, is it a picture caption or a header text?
- shepardrtc 9y agoDigit/letter recognition is near perfect with the latest algorithms and techniques, but organizing the output from scanning a document is still pretty hard.
- inoop 9y agoHave a look at Rekognition: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition
- Isamu 9y agoGoogle Cloud Vision API does this, and it's pretty good. https://cloud.google.com/vision/ https://cloud.google.com/vision/ https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/ocr https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/ocr https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/supported-files https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/supported-files You have to sign up for a developer account. If you are only doing low volume requests (up to 1000 a month) it is free.
- abhishekjha 9y agoI have been using it for a while to extract text from invoices/pdfs. The troble that I have to go to math the corresponding header to its value in each row is exhausting to say the least. Once Si het the text, I have to do an innumerable amount of hacks to get valid mappings. I wish we had a tool for that. ;)
- Isamu 9y agoDo you use the bounding box information? That seems like it could help you with table formats.
- abhishekjha 9y agoNot quiet though curious. Where can I read more on Bounding Box information?