Article

Classifying text with AWS Textract

Feb. 4, 2021

What is AWS Textract?

AWS Textract is an AWS service that allows the user to extract text and data from scanned documents such as insurance forms, loan applications, bank forms or survey questions. Amazon Textract automatically reads and extracts text from the documents and organizes the data into raw text, forms and tables. Enabling the data to either be reviewed by processes downstream or ingested directly into an application or database.

Figure 1: This image describes the business problem that AWS Textract solves

History of the Optical Character Recognition

Let us take a step back and briefly discuss what optical character recognition (OCR) is so that we can understand the impact of AWS Textract. Starting in the late 1800s through the early 1900s, the earliest concepts of OCR were developed to help the blind read. WWII and into the Cold War, OCR tools were used to convert Morse code to text. As time and technology progressed, OCR was used to digitize coupons and postal addresses. OCR’s capabilities grew exponentially with the microprocessor, resulting in additional capabilities such as price tag scanners, passport scanners and the ability to scan historically handwritten textbooks for preservation purposes. Currently, OCR is used in nearly every industry including automatic cameras that read your license plate when you speed through a red light, scanning a check with your phone to deposit it in real time, or even Google Translate when you are in a foreign country and in need of a quick translation of a menu or a sign!

How does OCR work?

Suppose we read a brand-new book. Think about how our eyes differentiate the background from the actual text. We identify the shapes of each letter and each word to form sentences as long as they are legible. We recognize the words and sentences on pages regardless of the print type, such as cursive, block, print or italicized, or font. Our brains are designed to recognize characters. Computers, however, need to be instructed on how to read in the same manner. Think of the letter “A”. Each of us think slightly differently about how the letter “A” is formed, but all versions are acceptable. A computer needs to understand that each one of those forms is equivalent to the letter “A” based on the pixel orientation within a word, sentence and document.

Suppose we have a digital form that a company sends us. Suppose this document is structured in such a way that the first column is the name of a project, the second column is a description, and the third is an amount of revenue. One way we can use an OCR tool is to instruct the computer to “look” in particular blocks. Then, we can have the computer naively look in those blocks and make a determination based on what text is in each block.

AWS Textract features

Amazon Textract is a pre-trained machine-learning model so that you, the user, do not have to reinvent the OCR process for every client or use case. Textract has been trained on millions of documents across a vast spectrum of different document types, such as receipts, sales orders, tax forms, insurance documents or bank loan forms. AWS Textract quickly and accurately extracts data from these scanned forms and documents. Textract automatically detects a document’s layout and key elements on the page, understands the data relationships in any embedded forms or tables, and extracts everything with its context intact. The user can then instantly use the extracted data in an application or store the data in a database.