5 ms·

I was hoping that they had taken the time to test tables, nested tables, and irregular table rows with headers every so often. A good example of what I’m talki

by cdolan 7y ago

I was hoping that they had taken the time to test tables, nested tables, and irregular table rows with headers every so often. A good example of what I’m talking about are invoices. In my line of work we extract data from thousands of different types of invoices that are the only place to find key data from your services provider (waste & recycling bills, soon other parts of a building’s expenses), and normalize that information. There is a long-tail of industries that are years away from having an API to transact information…but that information is available on their monthly statements in some sort of crazy table format! In my experience Amazon Textract has been the best in terms of processing speed, ease of use, and table extraction accuracy. However post processing is almost always needed with any OCR implementation. Edit: Its important to note that Microsoft and Google don’t even support table extraction in the APIs listed in this article!

tiernano 7y ago
just on the note of tables, have you tried the table extraction and OCR on Microsoft Excel on iPhone? It may also be on Android, i just tried it on iPhone, and man! it works great!
- cdolan 7y ago
  I have - its really good but for our use case (thousands of PDFs a day) that wouldn’t be reasonable :-(
andrejk 7y ago
Azure has a separate service to read forms and formatted docs. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/form-recognizer/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
- bpchaps 7y ago
  Do you know how good it is? I have a LOT of structured documents that I need to OCR.
  - CorneliaKara 7y ago
    MSFT person here - give it a try! sign up, and you get a free trial that can allow you to easily benchmark.
    - Havoc 7y ago
      Interesting. That is actually something I've been looking for and I do have a msdn sub. fyi that defaulted to indian rupee as default currency for me (UK based & zero indian connections). Weird
  - dav43 7y ago
    Have you tried the tabula free program? I use it for some finance work reading filings. http://tabula.technology/ http://tabula.technology/
    - bpchaps 7y ago
      Yep! It's great, but is maybe 60% there, so I'm looking for something that can extract much more structure from a document. I doubt what I'm looking for will exist for another 10 years, though.
      - leeoniya 7y ago
        is it feasible to create loose templates for where the data is and extract that way? i have a mothballed project that did pretty well. it was able to discern different templates from a mass of documents.
      - ocrcustomserver 7y ago
        I'm curious, if you email me a sample I can tell you what's possible.
- cdolan 7y ago
  Thanks I was not aware! I’ll have to figure out how to easily test it (AWS tectrsct is actually really nice in that regard)
jordoh 7y ago
That's a good point not explained in the article: there are a huge number of use cases for OCR. In this case, the use is extracting words that can be used in full-text search, so structural extraction isn't a key criteria. Edit: and now it's hopefully clarified in the article itself. :)
- ocrcustomserver 7y ago
  In this case, the use is extracting words that can be used in full-text search, so structural extraction isn't a key criteria. In case someone wants to know more, the former is known as "full page OCR" and the latter as "data capture"/"document processing" (or IDP, intelligent document processing). Full page OCR for machine printed text is considered a solved problem (but not for handwritten text). Data capture is hard to do and involves extracting specific fields from documents. The first big cloud company going into data capture territory was Amazon with AWS Textract (calling it OCR++). There's also Document Understanding AI (Google) and Azure Form Recognizer in Beta, as mentioned by others in this thread. The big 3 RPA companies (UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism) have also gone into data capture (calling it cognitive or intelligent RPA). ABBYY (with FlexiCapture) and Kofax (who recently acquired Nuance's imaging division, the 2nd most popular OCR engine after ABBYY's) are the traditional IDP players.
formercoder 7y ago
This comes up a lot with financial statements and government data as well. The government stuff is getting much better though.
eitally 7y ago
So does Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/document-understanding/ https://cloud.google.com/solutions/document-understanding/
- cdolan 7y ago
  Thnaks - looks like table extraction is in Alpha. I submitted a request to check it out!
itcrowd 7y ago
I found a relatively recent (Feb. 2019) comparison of OCR software and services [1]. It may be interesting to you, especially the "Texas Campaign Filing" comparison, which seems to have (nested) tables. [1] https://source.opennews.org/articles/so-many-ocr-options/ https://source.opennews.org/articles/so-many-ocr-options/
sandGorgon 7y ago
What kind of post processing? I'm not an expert, but usually we have done a lot of preprocessing (like binarization,etc) before we call cloud ocr services.
ocrcustomserver 7y ago
What is the accuracy that you're getting from it?

by cdolan 7y ago

tiernano 7y ago

just on the note of tables, have you tried the table extraction and OCR on Microsoft Excel on iPhone? It may also be on Android, i just tried it on iPhone, and man! it works great!

cdolan 7y ago
I have - its really good but for our use case (thousands of PDFs a day) that wouldn’t be reasonable :-(

andrejk 7y ago

Azure has a separate service to read forms and formatted docs. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/form-recognizer/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...

bpchaps 7y ago
Do you know how good it is? I have a LOT of structured documents that I need to OCR.
- CorneliaKara 7y ago
  MSFT person here - give it a try! sign up, and you get a free trial that can allow you to easily benchmark.
  - Havoc 7y ago
    Interesting. That is actually something I've been looking for and I do have a msdn sub. fyi that defaulted to indian rupee as default currency for me (UK based & zero indian connections). Weird
- dav43 7y ago
  Have you tried the tabula free program? I use it for some finance work reading filings. http://tabula.technology/ http://tabula.technology/
  - bpchaps 7y ago
    Yep! It's great, but is maybe 60% there, so I'm looking for something that can extract much more structure from a document. I doubt what I'm looking for will exist for another 10 years, though.
    - leeoniya 7y ago
      is it feasible to create loose templates for where the data is and extract that way? i have a mothballed project that did pretty well. it was able to discern different templates from a mass of documents.
    - ocrcustomserver 7y ago
      I'm curious, if you email me a sample I can tell you what's possible.
cdolan 7y ago
Thanks I was not aware! I’ll have to figure out how to easily test it (AWS tectrsct is actually really nice in that regard)

jordoh 7y ago

That's a good point not explained in the article: there are a huge number of use cases for OCR. In this case, the use is extracting words that can be used in full-text search, so structural extraction isn't a key criteria. Edit: and now it's hopefully clarified in the article itself. :)

ocrcustomserver 7y ago
In this case, the use is extracting words that can be used in full-text search, so structural extraction isn't a key criteria. In case someone wants to know more, the former is known as "full page OCR" and the latter as "data capture"/"document processing" (or IDP, intelligent document processing). Full page OCR for machine printed text is considered a solved problem (but not for handwritten text). Data capture is hard to do and involves extracting specific fields from documents. The first big cloud company going into data capture territory was Amazon with AWS Textract (calling it OCR++). There's also Document Understanding AI (Google) and Azure Form Recognizer in Beta, as mentioned by others in this thread. The big 3 RPA companies (UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism) have also gone into data capture (calling it cognitive or intelligent RPA). ABBYY (with FlexiCapture) and Kofax (who recently acquired Nuance's imaging division, the 2nd most popular OCR engine after ABBYY's) are the traditional IDP players.

formercoder 7y ago

This comes up a lot with financial statements and government data as well. The government stuff is getting much better though.

eitally 7y ago

So does Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/document-understanding/ https://cloud.google.com/solutions/document-understanding/

cdolan 7y ago
Thnaks - looks like table extraction is in Alpha. I submitted a request to check it out!

itcrowd 7y ago

I found a relatively recent (Feb. 2019) comparison of OCR software and services [1]. It may be interesting to you, especially the "Texas Campaign Filing" comparison, which seems to have (nested) tables. [1] https://source.opennews.org/articles/so-many-ocr-options/ https://source.opennews.org/articles/so-many-ocr-options/

sandGorgon 7y ago

What kind of post processing? I'm not an expert, but usually we have done a lot of preprocessing (like binarization,etc) before we call cloud ocr services.

ocrcustomserver 7y ago

What is the accuracy that you're getting from it?