Amazon Rekognition for text detection

Question

I have images of receipts and I want to store the text in the images separately. Is it possible to detect text from images using Amazon Rekognition?

Answer 1

Update from November 2017:

Amazon Rekognition announces real-time face recognition, Text in Image recognition, and improved face detection

Read the announcement here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/amazon-rekognition-announces-real-time-face-recognition-text-in-image-recognition-and-improved-face-detection/

Proof:

Answer 2

You may get better results with Amazon Textract although it's currently only available in limited preview.

It's possible to detect text in an image using the AWS JS SDK for Rekognition but your results may vary.

/* jshint esversion: 6, node:true, devel: true, undef: true, unused: true */

// Import libs.
const AWS = require('aws-sdk');
const axios = require('axios');

// Grab AWS access keys from Environmental Variables.
const { S3_ACCESS_KEY, S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, S3_REGION } = process.env;

// Configure AWS with credentials.
AWS.config.update({
  accessKeyId: S3_ACCESS_KEY,
  secretAccessKey: S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY,
  region: S3_REGION
});

const rekognition = new AWS.Rekognition({
  apiVersion: '2016-06-27'
});

const TEXT_IMAGE_URL = 'https://loremflickr.com/g/320/240/text';

(async url => {

  // Fetch the URL.
  const textDetections = await axios
    .get(url, {
      responseType: 'arraybuffer'
    })

    // Convert to base64 Buffer.
    .then(response => new Buffer(response.data, 'base64'))

    // Pass bytes to SDK
    .then(bytes =>
      rekognition
        .detectText({
          Image: {
            Bytes: bytes
          }
        })
        .promise()
    )
    .catch(error => {
      console.log('[ERROR]', error);
      return false;
    });

  if (!textDetections) return console.log('Failed to find text.');

  // Output the raw response.
  console.log('\n', 'Text Detected:', '\n', textDetections);

  // Output to Detected Text only.
  console.log('\n', 'Found Text:', '\n', textDetections.TextDetections.map(t => t.DetectedText));

})(TEXT_IMAGE_URL);

See more examples of using Rekognition with NodeJS in this answer.