A few months ago I tried using AWS Rekognition to detect text in images. The results were okay for casual use cases but overall the quality was pretty poor (primarily because Rekognition isn’t intended to be used as an OCR product).

A few days ago (May 29), AWS announced the general availability of Textract, an actual OCR product. Out of curiosity, I wanted to run the same image I ran through Rekognition through Textract to compare the difference. While Textract isn’t 100%, it’s a huge improvement over Rekognition (as should be expected since it’s intended for this).

• View full results of Rekognition
• View full results of Textract

Below is a side-by-side comparison of the results from the two services:

As always, here’s my source used for this test:

<?php
require '/home/bitnami/vendor/autoload.php'; 

use Aws\Textract\TextractClient;
use Aws\Exception\AwsException;

$client = new TextractClient([
'version' => 'latest',
'region' => 'us-west-2',
'credentials' => [
  'key' => '', //IAM user key
  'secret' => '', //IAM user secret
]]);

try{
  $result = $client->detectDocumentText([
    'Document' => [
      'S3Object' => [
        'Bucket' => 'fkrekognition',
        'Name' => 'receipt_preview.jpg'
      ],
    ],
  ]);
} catch (AwsException $e){
  echo "<pre>Error: $e</pre>";
}

echo "<h1>Textract</h1>";
echo "<img src=https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/fkrekognition/receipt_preview.jpg><br />";
$i=0;
echo "<table border=1 cellspacing=0><tr><td>#</td><td>BlockType</td><td>Text</td><td>Confidence</td></tr>";
foreach ($result['Blocks'] as $phrase) {
  if($phrase['BlockType']=="LINE"){
    $i++;
    echo "<tr><td>$i</td><td>".$phrase['BlockType']."</td><td>".$phrase['Text']."</td><td>".round($phrase['Confidence'])."%</td></tr>";
  }
}
echo "</table>";
  
echo "<h1>Raw Output</h1><pre>";
print_r($result);
echo "</pre>";
?>