(Originally published elsewhere in 2018), AWS Rekognition Text detection limited to 50 words.

AWS Rekognition Text detection limited to 50 words

I built an API which uses Rekognition on AWS quickly, just to test the text detection capability.

Approach

I create a Flask API and utilised boto.

rek = boto3.client('rekognition', region_name="us-east-1")

After that I took the image bytes directly and ran a detect_text call, not too tough.

Detect text result

I uploaded an image with a small number of words and was pleased with the result. However when uploading an image containing a paragraph I found that only a subset of the words were returned.

The limit is 50 words -

“DetectText can detect up to 50 words in an image.”[0]

Text result response

The response splits up items by Type, either “line” or “word”, and has a parentID when a word, so I filtered just the lines like this:

if label['Type']=="LINE"

It works, great result, but a solution for a larger number of words makes me think of just running this through Tesseract OCR.

[0] - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/latest/dg/text-detection.html (Last paragraph)

Architect Forward (architectFWD™)


Originally published elsewhere on 08 July, 2019.

Quintes van Aswegen

Quintes van Aswegen

24+ years experience in solving business problems and maximising opportunities through technology in a variety of industries, public and private sector internationally. I founded architectFWD™ to provide knowledge and trusted advice in the areas of strategy, technology, cloud and digital to enable organisations to become Digital Leaders.