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I'm an ML engineer, worked as a part time data engineer consultant for a medical lines/claims extraction company, for 3 years, which majorly involved in extrac
by saradhi 7y ago
I'm an ML engineer, worked as a part time data engineer consultant for a medical lines/claims extraction company, for 3 years, which majorly involved in extracting the tabular data from the PDFs and Images. Developer rules or parsers as such is JUST no help. You end up creating a new rule every time you miss the data extraction.
With that in consideration, and the existing resources are little help especially on skewed, blurry, handwritten and 2 different table structure in the input, I ended up creating an API service to extract tabular data from Images and PDFs - hosted as https://extracttable.com https://extracttable.com . We cared it to be robust, average extraction time on images is under 5 seconds. On top of maintaining accuracy, A bad extraction is eligible for credit usage refund, which literally not any service offer it.
i Invite HN users to give it a try and feel free to email saradhi@extracttable.com for extra API credits for the trail.
- CaptArmchair 7y agoI chuckled at your "the worst image" sample. Which still looked quite decent all things considered. You're "handwritten" example looks a bit "too decent" as well. I can see how that works. You first look for the edges of the table, and then you evaluate the symbol in each cell as something that matches unicode. So, how well does this cope with increasing degradation? i.e. pencil written notes that bleed outside cell borders, curve around borders, etc.? Stamps and symbols (watermarks) across tables?
- saradhi 7y ago"pencil written notes that bleed outside cell borders, curve around borders, etc.? Stamps and symbols (watermarks) across tables?" "The Worst Image" is a close match to that, except it is a print. Regarding increasing degradation - as stated above, the OCR engine is not proprietary - we confined ourselves to detect the structure at this moment, and started with the most common problems.
- jazzido 7y agoHi, author and maintainer of Tabula (https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula). We've been trying to contact you about the "Tabula Pro" version that you are offering. Feel free to reachme at manuel at jazzido dot com
- staticautomatic 7y agoEdit: See reply below Am I reading the repos correctly? It looks like Extractable copied Tabula (MIT) to its own repo rather than forking it, removed the attribution, and then tried to re-license it as Apache 2.0. If so, that would be pretty fucked up. https://github.com/tabulapdf https://github.com/tabulapdf https://github.com/ExtractTable/tabulapro https://github.com/ExtractTable/tabulapro
- jazzido 7y agoNot really. They import tabula_py, which is a Python wrapper around tabula-java (the library of which I'm a maintainer). Still, I would have loved at least a heads up from the team that sells Tabula Pro. I know they're not required to do so, but hey, they're kinda piggybacking on Tabula's "reputation".
- staticautomatic 7y agoThanks for clarifying.
- bruckie 7y agoIf you control the Tabula trademark (which doesn't necessarily require a formal registration), you may be able to prohibit them from using the TabulaPro name. That's exactly what trademark law is for. (IANAL)
- wpietri 7y agoYou're being much more polite here than I would be. Even if it isn't illegal, what they've done is a giant dick move.
- saradhi 7y agoWilliam, the intention of "TabulaPro" is to give the developers a chance to use a single library instead of switching ExtractTable for images and tabula-py for text PDFs. What do you recommend us to do, to not make you feel we made a dick move. TIA