Amazon Textract vs Amazon Rekognition DetectText

Question

How do I decide when to use Amazon Textract vs Amazon Rekognition's TextDetect method?

My usecase is click picture from mobile and convert image data into text and store into AWS RDS.

• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rekognition-image-detection-and-recognition-powered-by-deep-learning/

• https://aws.amazon.com/textract/

Padua

Accepting an answer below helps other users more easily find this! I see this question a bunch and having the green "answered" color makes users much more likely to stumble into this thread. – Soybean

Answer 1

If there is simply random text in the picture, then use Amazon Rekognition. It will find text in any location.

Amazon Textract is designed for converting paper documents into organized data. It will probably not work well with a random picture (although I haven't tried it so I can't be certain!).

Bracci

To build on top of John's answer, Amazon Textract API would work just as well on any image having text. However, recommendation would still be to go with Rekognition Detect Text API. due to the reduced pricing for simpler use cases. – Gallicanism

Answer 2

With respect to end-to-end problem solving, Textract will perform better because it is more fully featured for OCR. If you're simply trying to pull a line or two of text from a picture shot in the wild, like street signs or billboards, (ie: not a document or form) I'd recommend Amazon Rekognition.

Amazon Textract is a newer AWS service that was created as a purpose-built solution to the problem of OCR (optical character recognition) in images of documents and PDFs. While Rekognition is a more generalizable computer vision service, Textract has many more OCR-oriented tuning parameters to optimize the process of accurately and effectively extracting text.

Out of the box, if all you are trying to do is detect text and the relevant metadata (coordinates, angle, confidence value), the Rekognition DetectText method will likely perform similarly to the equivalent analyze_document method in Textract, however Textract offers further semantic structuring that helps with text curation/formatting that abstracts other forms of post-processing that the developer would traditionally need to write themselves.

Lastly, when comparing the costs of the two Detect Text methods, Textract costs a bit more ($1.50/1k images) compared to Rekognition ($1.00/1k images).

Soybean