In this article, we will introduce our top 10 OCR Invoice Parser, how to choose and access the right engine according to your data.
What's Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?
Optical Character Recognition traces its roots back to telegraphy. On the eve of the First World War, physicist Emanuel Goldberg invented a machine that could read characters and convert them into telegraph code. In the 1920s, he went a step further and created the first electronic document retrieval system.
Early versions of OCR had to be trained with images of each character and were limited to recognizing one font at a time. In the 1970s, inventor Ray Kurzweil commercialized “omni-font OCR”, which could process text printed in almost any font.
OCR Technology became popular in the early 1990s while attempting to digitize historic newspapers. In the early 2000s, OCR became available online as a cloud-based service, accessible via desktop and mobile applications.
Today, there’s a host of OCR service providers offering technology (often accessible via APIs) capable of recognizing most characters and fonts to a high level of accuracy.
How does Invoice OCR API work?
Just like OCR for Receipt and Resume, Invoice OCR is a tool powered by OCR to extract and digitalize meaningful data from scanned or PDF invoices. Fields commonly captured by Invoice OCR include description, quantity, due date, line items, invoice number, merchant information, customer information, unit price, bill, receipt number, total amount, tax amount, etc.
OCR Invoice Parser result on Eden AI
This technology is built on multiple steps:
1. The first step in Invoice OCR technology consists in preprocessing the image —usually the scanned invoices are noisy, so a preprocessing with noise removal and gray scaling are needed. This step is necessary for the text extraction engines to work well. Next step is text detection with OCR (for Optical Character Recognition). It extracts a text from various file types: PDF, DOCX, JPEG, PNG, etc. Their goal is only to get the texts in the document without dealing with the structure of the document.
2. What follows consists of data extraction and categorization, where it classifies the extracted text into keys and tags like tax and total amount. It is based on deep learning algorithms and NER (Named Entity Recognition). The final result of the parsing is a structured form that can be readable by the computer. It’s often a JSON, XML or even a CSV file which makes it easy to be stored into a database and automatically analyzed.
Top 10 Invoice OCR APIs
Top 10 Invoice OCR APIs
1. Affinda - Available on Eden AI
Affinda AI-powered invoice data extraction solution processes documents across a wide range of different formats. Capture data from more than 40 different fields, all fully customizable for your organization’s specific needs.
Affinda’s inbuilt intelligent OCR is capable of reading scanned invoices, and even photos of invoices. Their invoice reader can understand a range of formats, including PDF, JPG, PNG, word, and more. The vast proportion of fields can be automatically extracted with better-than-human level accuracy (>98%).
2. AWS - Available on Eden AI
Amazon Textract is a machine learning-based OCR service that can automatically extract text and data from a wide range of document types, including invoices. The extracted data can be used to automate invoice processing and data entry tasks. Additionally, Amazon Textract can be integrated with other AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SQS to enable users to automatically store, process, and analyze the extracted data. This can help users to improve efficiency, reduce costs and errors and also provide insights from the data.
3. Base64 - Available on Eden AI
Base64.ai is a cloud-based artificial intelligence service that instantly and accurately extracts text, data, handwriting, photos, and signatures from all types of documents, including IDs, driver licenses, passports, visas, receipts, invoices, forms, and hundreds of other document types worldwide. In seconds, Base64.ai discerns the document's type, extracts the relevant information, verifies the results, and integrates them into the customer's systems.
4. Dataleon - Available on Eden AI
Dataleon provides the best Machine Learning tools for data automation and processing. Ready-to-use API for data recognition and extraction are available to accelerate digital transformation powered by artificial intelligence. To resolve in the best way company’s issues, Dataleon develops innovative automation and adjustable solutions available in the cloud with IA.
5. Klippa
Klippa offers data & AI consulting and AI-powered SaaS solutions for automating your administrative tasks and workflows based on documents and images. Klippa offers solutions for scanning, expense management, invoice processing, KYC, loyalty, logistics, and back-office automation. These solutions are available as an end-to-end solutions, but also as RPA components, APIs and SDKs.
6. Microsoft - Available on Eden AI
Form Recognizer is an AI service that applies advanced machine learning to extract text, key-value pairs, tables, and structures from documents automatically and accurately. Turn documents into usable data and shift your focus to acting on information rather than compiling it.
7. Mindee - Available on Eden AI
Mindee helps software product teams build lightning-fast, accurate, and robust document processing automation features in their applications. Their API gives developers access to state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms for document parsing through an easy-to-use and developer-centric platform.
The full extraction process is performed without any humans in the loop, allowing you to offer real-time experience with a maximum level of data privacy. Mindee’s algorithms don’t need to read all the document text in its language to extract the relevant information.
8. Rossum
Rossum solves four key steps in document-based processes at once: receiving documents across multiple channels, automated understanding, two-way communication to resolve exceptions, and acting on the data using in-depth integrations. In typical real-world scenarios, Rossum’s proprietary AI engine outranks narrow data extraction solutions in accuracy.
9. Veryfi
Veryfi uses its innovative AI software to provide Intelligent Document Processing. Veryfi AI is pre-trained to extract and transform unstructured data from receipts, invoices, purchase orders, checks, W2s and other business documents into structured data, in seconds, without a human in the loop. Trusted by enterprises and technology companies alike, Veryfi’s AI-based platform is currently in use at hundreds of organizations worldwide.
10. Xtracta
Xtracta provides AI-powered data extraction software and OCR solutions to help your organization with all kinds of document automation. Powered by artificial intelligence, Xtracta technology automatically extracts information and captures data from documents, whether they are scanned, photographed, or digital. The technology can be embedded into virtually any software application via our easy-to-use API.
Some OCR Invoice Parser API use cases
OCR for invoices can be used to extract data from invoices and automatically generate legal documents. This technology has the ability to automate a wide range of tasks in different fields (Finance, Accounting, Auditing, Supply Chain Management, etc.) depending on the specific needs of the industry.
Why choose Eden AI to manage your APIs
Companies and developers from a wide range of industries (Social Media, Retail, Health, Finances, Law, etc.) use Eden AI’s unique API to easily integrate OCR Invoice Parser tasks in their cloud-based applications, without having to build their own solutions.
Eden AI offers multiple AI APIs on its platform amongst several technologies: Text-to-Speech, Language Detection, Sentiment analysis API, Summarization, Question Answering, Data Anonymization, Speech recognition, and so forth.
We want our users to have access to multiple OCR Invoice Parser engines and manage them in one place so they can reach high performance, optimize cost and cover all their needs. There are many reasons for using multiple APIs:
Fallback provider is the ABCs
You need to set up a provider API that is requested if and only if the main OCR Invoice Parser API does not perform well (or is down). You can use confidence score returned or other methods to check provider accuracy.
Performance optimization.
After the testing phase, you will be able to build a mapping of providers performance based on the criteria you have chosen (languages, fields, etc.). Each data that you need to process will then be sent to the best OCR Invoice Parser API.
Cost - Performance ratio optimization.
You can choose the cheapest OCR Invoice Parser provider that performs well for your data.
Combine multiple AI APIs.
This approach is required if you look for extremely high accuracy. The combination leads to higher costs but allows your AI service to be safe and accurate because OCR Invoice Parser APIs will validate and invalidate each other for each piece of data.
How Eden AI can help you?
Eden AI has been made for multiple AI APIs use. Eden AI is the future of AI usage in companies. Eden AI allows you to call multiple AI APIs.
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One API for multiple AI engines - Eden AI
Centralized and fully monitored billing on Eden AI for all OCR Invoice Parser APIs
Unified API for all providers: simple and standard to use, quick switch between providers, access to the specific features of each provider
Standardized response format: the JSON output format is the same for all suppliers thanks to Eden AI's standardization work. The response elements are also standardized thanks to Eden AI's powerful matching algorithms.
The best Artificial Intelligence APIs in the market are available: big cloud providers (Google, AWS, Microsoft, and more specialized engines)
Data protection: Eden AI will not store or use any data. Possibility to filter to use only GDPR engines.
You can see Eden AI documentation here.
Next step in your project
The Eden AI team can help you with your OCR Invoice Parser integration project. This can be done by :
Organizing a product demo and a discussion to better understand your needs. You can book a time slot here: Contact
By testing the public version of Eden AI for free: however, not all providers are available on this version. Some are only available on the Enterprise version.
By benefiting from the support and advice of a team of experts to find the optimal combination of providers according to the specifics of your needs
Having the possibility to integrate on a third-party platform: we can quickly develop connectors