OCR cognitive skill

The Optical character recognition (OCR) skill recognizes printed and handwritten text in image files. This article is the reference documentation for the OCR skill. See Extract text from images for usage instructions.

An OCR skill uses the machine learning models provided by Azure AI Vision API v3.2 in Azure AI services. The OCR skill maps to the following functionality:

• For the languages listed under Azure AI Vision language support, the Read API is used.

• For Greek and Serbian Cyrillic, the legacy OCR in version 3.2 API is used.

The OCR skill extracts text from image files. Supported file formats include:

• .JPEG
• .JPG
• .PNG
• .BMP
• .TIFF

Skill parameters

Parameters are case-sensitive.

In previous versions, there was a parameter called "textExtractionAlgorithm" to specify extraction of "printed" or "handwritten" text. This parameter is deprecated because the current Read API algorithm extracts both types of text at once. If your skill includes this parameter, you don't need to remove it, but it won't be used during skill execution.

Skill inputs

Skill outputs

If you call OCR on images embedded in PDFs or other application files, the OCR output will be located at the bottom of the page, after any text that was extracted and processed.

Sample definition

{
  "skills": [
    {
      "description": "Extracts text (plain and structured) from image.",
      "@odata.type": "#Microsoft.Skills.Vision.OcrSkill",
      "context": "/document/normalized_images/*",
      "defaultLanguageCode": null,
      "detectOrientation": true,
      "inputs": [
        {
          "name": "image",
          "source": "/document/normalized_images/*"
        }
      ],
      "outputs": [
        {
          "name": "text",
          "targetName": "myText"
        },
        {
          "name": "layoutText",
          "targetName": "myLayoutText"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Sample text and layoutText output

{
  "text": "Hello World. -John",
  "layoutText":
  {
    "language" : "en",
    "text" : "Hello World. -John",
    "lines" : [
      {
        "boundingBox":
        [ {"x":10, "y":10}, {"x":50, "y":10}, {"x":50, "y":30},{"x":10, "y":30}],
        "text":"Hello World."
      },
      {
        "boundingBox": [ {"x":110, "y":10}, {"x":150, "y":10}, {"x":150, "y":30},{"x":110, "y":30}],
        "text":"-John"
      }
    ],
    "words": [
      {
        "boundingBox": [ {"x":110, "y":10}, {"x":150, "y":10}, {"x":150, "y":30},{"x":110, "y":30}],
        "text":"Hello"
      },
      {
        "boundingBox": [ {"x":110, "y":10}, {"x":150, "y":10}, {"x":150, "y":30},{"x":110, "y":30}],
        "text":"World."
      },
      {
        "boundingBox": [ {"x":110, "y":10}, {"x":150, "y":10}, {"x":150, "y":30},{"x":110, "y":30}],
        "text":"-John"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Sample: Merging text extracted from embedded images with the content of the document

Document cracking, the first step in skillset execution, separates text and image content. A common use case for Text Merger is merging the textual representation of images (text from an OCR skill, or the caption of an image) into the content field of a document. This is for scenarios where the source document is a PDF or Word document that combines text with embedded images.

The following example skillset creates a merged_text field. This field contains the textual content of your document and the OCRed text from each of the images embedded in that document.

Request Body Syntax

{
  "description": "Extract text from images and merge with content text to produce merged_text",
  "skills":
  [
    {
      "description": "Extract text (plain and structured) from image.",
      "@odata.type": "#Microsoft.Skills.Vision.OcrSkill",
      "context": "/document/normalized_images/*",
      "defaultLanguageCode": "en",
      "detectOrientation": true,
      "inputs": [
        {
          "name": "image",
          "source": "/document/normalized_images/*"
        }
      ],
      "outputs": [
        {
          "name": "text"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "@odata.type": "#Microsoft.Skills.Text.MergeSkill",
      "description": "Create merged_text, which includes all the textual representation of each image inserted at the right location in the content field.",
      "context": "/document",
      "insertPreTag": " ",
      "insertPostTag": " ",
      "inputs": [
        {
          "name":"text",
          "source": "/document/content"
        },
        {
          "name": "itemsToInsert", 
          "source": "/document/normalized_images/*/text"
        },
        {
          "name":"offsets", 
          "source": "/document/normalized_images/*/contentOffset"
        }
      ],
      "outputs": [
        {
          "name": "mergedText", 
          "targetName" : "merged_text"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

The above skillset example assumes that a normalized-images field exists. To generate this field, set the imageAction configuration in your indexer definition to generateNormalizedImages as shown below:

{
  //...rest of your indexer definition goes here ...
  "parameters": {
    "configuration": {
      "dataToExtract":"contentAndMetadata",
      "imageAction":"generateNormalizedImages"
    }
  }
}

See also

• What is optical character recognition
• Built-in skills
• TextMerger skill
• How to define a skillset
• Extract text and information from images
• Create Indexer (REST)