OCR a PDF Document

Overview

The 'OCR a PDF Document' performs OCR on the PDF document provided.

Example Flow

Please refer to the following article detailing how to 'Automatically OCR PDF Documents added to a SharePoint Library'

Power Automate Templates

• OCR the selected PDF document in SharePoint
• Check and OCR the selected PDF document in SharePoint
• OCR all PDF documents in a SharePoint Library
• Create OCR version of all PDF documents in a SharePoint Library

Default Parameters

The default 'OCR a PDF Document' flow action parameters are detailed below:

• Filename: The PDF filename (including the file extension).
• File Content: A Base64 encoded representation of the PDF file to be processed.

Please refer to the Obtaining the 'File Contents' Parameter article for guidance on how to obtain the 'File Content' parameter ready to provide to an Encodian flow action. 

Additional Guidance

The 'OCR a PDF Document' flow action will increase the output PDF document's file size. If 'Clean Operations' are performed, the file size increase will be higher still.

Action Count

OCR is a resource-intensive operation, therefore a single OCR action is recorded for every page OCR'd. For example, a 10-page document equates to 10 actions. 

Advanced Parameters

The advanced 'OCR a PDF Document' flow action parameters are detailed below:

• OCR Type: Quality ensures enhanced recognition accuracy, Fast provides standard OCR accuracy with increased processing speed.
• PDF/A Compliant: Sets whether the resulting document should conform to PDF/A format.
• PDF/A Compliance Level: Sets the required level of PDF/A compliance
• Clean Operations: Set whether page level clean-up operations should be performed. The default option will auto rotate, auto deskew and auto despeckle each page within the PDF Document.

The following advanced options only apply when the 'Clean Operations' property has been set to 'Specific':

• Language: Set the language used for OCR processing.
• Rotate: Automatically detects orientation and rotates it so that the text on it is upright oriented.
• Rotate Confidence Level: Sets the minimum confidence percentage (0 to 100) used to control whether the rotation is applied.
• Deskew: Detects the skew angle and rotates to remove that skew.
• Despeckle: Automatically detects speckles and removes them.
• Adjust Brightness and Contrast: This action analyses a document and automatically adjusts brightness and contrast based on the analysis.
• Remove Border: Locates border pixels and removes the pixels from the document.
• Smooth Background: This works only on colour and grayscale documents. This operation smooths background colours to eliminate or de-emphasise noise.
• Smooth Objects: This only works on bi-tonal documents, it looks at groups of pixels, and finds isolated bumps and pits in the edges of those objects, and fills them in.
• Remove Dot Shading: This action will remove shaded regions from bi-tonal documents.
• Image Detergent: Image Detergent works by changing pixels of similar colour values to a central colour value, which has the result of smoothing the image wherever regions of those colours appear.
• Average Filter: Performs a 3x3 Average filter smoothing operation on the document, placing the output in the centre of the window.
• Remove Hole Punch: Detects and removes hole punch marks from a bi-tonal document.
• Binarize: Computes all necessary parameters by analysing the input data before actually performing the binarization. The algorithm is tuned to typical document images, consisting of dark text on brighter background. It is robust to shadows, noise and background images.

Further advanced operations:

• Operation ID: (Advanced) The ID of a parent operation; please refer to: Flow Action Return Options: File Content vs. Operation ID
• Return File: (Advanced) Sets whether the action should return a file or alternatively an operation ID: Flow Action Return Options: File Content vs. Operation ID