The Fundamentals of AWS API For OCR and Structured Data Extraction

OCR and Structured Data Extraction With AWS APIs

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been around since the mid-20th century, however, it continues to evolve and metamorphose in accordance with new advances in related technologies. It is the process that makes data extraction from images seamless after converting them into machine-readable formats. For instance, if you scan a receipt or a form, your computer subsequently saves the scan as an image file. In such a format, you can not use a text editor to edit, count, or search for any words in the image file. But with OCR, you can easily convert the image into a text document where all its content is saved as text data. This data can be then used for conducting analytics, automating processes, streamlining operations, and improving productivity. 

On the basis of the usage and applications of OCR technology, it is classified into the following software examples:

• Intelligent character recognition software
• Simple optical character recognition software
• Intelligent word recognition
• Optical mark recognition 

In this context, AWS APIs have been extensively used to enhance the performance of OCR and document processing technologies. Amazon Textract and Amazon Rekognition are the two prominent services that can assist you to implement OCR into your businesses. In this blog, we will elaborate on their functionalities, benefits, and applications, and how they can help in structured data extraction and successful app integration. So, let’s get started.

What is AWS Textract?

Amazon Textract makes it relatively simple to inculcate document text detection and analysis into your applications. The Amazon Textract Text Detection API can seamlessly detect handwritten and typed text in a plethora of documents such as tax forms, medical records, and financial reports. Moreover, for documents with structured data, Amazon Textract Document Analysis API can be used to extract text, tables, and forms. 

AWS API solutions were purpose-built to augment the functionality of OCR in image processing and extracting valuable text from images of documents and PDFs. Here are some of the key highlights:

• Easy setup with AWS services: As compared to other service providers, setting up Textract with another AWS service is a relatively easy task
   
• Security: Amazon Textract conforms to the model of AWS shared responsibility, which entails appropriate guidelines for data protection
   
• Improve compliance and overall security with robust data encryption, security controls, data privacy, and support compliance standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, and more
   
• AWS is ideally responsible for safeguarding the global infrastructure that powers and runs all the AWS services, hence, you do not need to worry about data being used by others or leaked in any way
   
• Amazon Textract leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms for text extraction, tables, layouts, forms, and structured data with context and without training, configuration, or custom code
   
• AWS Textract goes beyond simple OCR to identify the information stored in tables and contents of fields in forms
   
• With Amazon Augmented AI (A2I), you can easily implement human reviews to manage sensitive or nuanced workflows and audit predictions
   
• Process receipts and invoices using AnalyzeExpense API
   
• Extract and specify information from documents with the Queries feature using Amazon Textract Analyze Document API

What is AWS Rekognition?

Amazon Rekognition is broadly used in organizations for image-related projects such as image processing, image classification, and object detection. It can analyze millions of images as well as videos along with enhancing human visual review tasks with ML and AI algorithms. Amazon Rekognition APIs can be rightfully used for both images and videos. You can extract distorted and skewed texts from videos and images of street signs, product packaging, social media posts, and more. 

Here are some of the functionalities of Amazon Rekognition APIs:

• Quickly add customizable or pre-trained computer vision APIs to your business applications without constructing separate ML models and infrastructure from scratch
   
• Analyze millions of images, streaming videos, or symbols within seconds
   
• Scale up and down in accordance with your business requirements with fully-managed AI capabilities
   
• Detect faces appearing in videos or images and recognize attributes such as facial hair, open eyes, glasses, etc
   
• Detect key segments in videos such as color bars, slates, black frames, start or end credits, and shots
   
• Detect objects such as pets, packages, or people from live video streams in real-time
   
• Identify custom objects such as brand logos using automated machine learning (AutoML) with as few as 10 images to train your models
   
• Detect potentially inappropriate, unsafe, or unwanted content across videos or images

Also Read: The Requisite of POS Invoicing App Development in 2022

Use Cases of AWS APIs For OCR

Amazon Textract

• Financial services: Extract critical business data such as applicant names, invoice totals, and mortgage rates across a myriad of financial forms to process mortgage and loan applications within minutes.
   
• Healthcare and life sciences: Serve patients and insurers better by extracting pivotal patient data from pre-authorization forms, insurance claims, and health-intake forms. Eliminate manual review of output and keep data organized in accordance with its original context.
   
• Public sector: Extract relevant data easily from government-related forms such as business applications, federal tax forms, and small business loans with a higher rate of accuracy.

Amazon Rekognition

• Verify identity online: Use facial analysis and comparison in your user authentication and onboarding process to verify the identity of applicants remotely and accurately.
   
• Detect inappropriate content: Accurately and quickly identify inappropriate or unsafe content across videos and images based on business-specific or general standards and practices.
   
• Send connected home smart alerts: Deliver actionable and timely alerts whenever a desired object is detected in any live video streams. Construct seamless home automation experiences such as turning on the lights automatically if any person is detected.
   
• Streamline media analysis: Detect key video segments automatically to reduce cost, time, and effort spent in video ad insertion, content production, and content operations. 

Looking for OCR and Data Extractions Services Using AWS APIs?

At Oodles Technologies, we enable businesses to analyze various documents, images, and videos and augment human visual review tasks using artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. As an established AI app development company, we provide comprehensive OCR and text extraction services using Google Vision and AWS APIs. Over the years, we have assisted numerous companies to overcome the challenges of processing documents and images and converting them into structured and machine-readable data formats for effective business operations and increased productivity. Our skilled developers offer in-depth assistance pertaining to automatically extracting handwritten data, printed texts, and other relatable data from any document. If you are looking for advanced OCR and text detection/analysis/extraction services, feel free to book a free consultation with our team. Our experts will get back to you within 24 hours.