Many organizations need to extract information from PDF files that are uploaded to their business applications. For example, an organization could need to accurately extract information from tax or medical PDF files for tax analysis or medical claim processing.
On the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, Amazon Textract automatically extracts information (for example, printed text, forms, and tables) from PDF files and produces a JSON-formatted file that contains information from the original PDF file. You can use Amazon Textract in the AWS Management Console or by implementing API calls. We recommend that you use programmatic API calls to scale and automatically process large numbers of PDF files.
When Amazon Textract processes a file, it creates the following list of Block objects: pages, lines and words of text, forms (key-value pairs), tables and cells, and selection elements. Other object information is also included, for example, bounding boxes, confidence intervals, IDs, and relationships. Amazon Textract extracts the content information as strings. Correctly identified and transformed data values are required because they can be more easily used by your downstream applications.
This pattern describes a step-by-step workflow for using Amazon Textract to automatically extract content from PDF files and process it into a clean output. The pattern uses a template matching technique to correctly identify the required field, key name, and tables, and then applies post-processing corrections to each data type. You can use this pattern to process different types of PDF files and you can then scale and automate this workflow to process PDF files that have an identical format.
