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PDF-to-Text: A nightmare that never ends

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Video | Material | Knowledge Summary

Summary

The video is about PDF-to-text and the challenges involved. The speaker, Napat, an AI/ML engineer at ArcFusion.ai who has experience working on PDF-to-Text conversion, discusses the difficulties of converting PDFs to text, especially scanned PDFs.

The speaker mentions that there are 3 main components to consider when working with PDFs: images, tables, and text.

  • Images: Extracting images from digital PDFs is straightforward, but extracting images from scanned PDFs requires using object detection.
  • Tables: Extracting tables can be done using libraries if the tables have borders around each cell. Extracting tables without borders is more challenging.
  • Text: Text extraction is the most important part. The speaker mentions that there are challenges with accuracy, especially when dealing with scanned PDFs, which needed OCR.