Text Detection and Document Analysis Response Objects

When Amazon Textract processes a document, it creates a list of Block objects for the detected or analyzed text. Each block contains information about a detected item, where it's located, and the confidence that Amazon Textract has in the accuracy of the processing.

A document is made up from the following types of Block objects.

The contents of a block depend on the operation you call. If you call one of the text detection operations, the pages, lines, and words of detected text are returned. For more information, see Detecting Text. If you call one of the document analysis operations, information about detected pages, key-value pairs, tables, selection elements, and text is returned. For more information, see Analyzing Documents.

Some Block object fields are common to both types of processing. For example, each block has a unique identifier.

For examples that show how to use Block objects, see Tutorials.

Document Layout

Amazon Textract returns a representation of a document as a list of different types of Block objects that are linked in a parent-to-child relationship or a key-value pair. Metadata that provides the number of pages in a document is also returned. The following is the JSON for a typical Block object of type PAGE.

{
    "Blocks": [
        {
            "Geometry": {
                "BoundingBox": {
                    "Width": 1.0, 
                    "Top": 0.0, 
                    "Left": 0.0, 
                    "Height": 1.0
                }, 
                "Polygon": [
                    {
                        "Y": 0.0, 
                        "X": 0.0
                    }, 
                    {
                        "Y": 0.0, 
                        "X": 1.0
                    }, 
                    {
                        "Y": 1.0, 
                        "X": 1.0
                    }, 
                    {
                        "Y": 1.0, 
                        "X": 0.0
                    }
                ]
            }, 
            "Relationships": [
                {
                    "Type": "CHILD", 
                    "Ids": [
                        "2602b0a6-20e3-4e6e-9e46-3be57fd0844b", 
                        "82aedd57-187f-43dd-9eb1-4f312ca30042", 
                        "52be1777-53f7-42f6-a7cf-6d09bdc15a30", 
                        "7ca7caa6-00ef-4cda-b1aa-5571dfed1a7c"
                    ]
                }
            ], 
            "BlockType": "PAGE", 
            "Id": "8136b2dc-37c1-4300-a9da-6ed8b276ea97"
        }..... 
        
    ], 
    "DocumentMetadata": {
        "Pages": 1
    }
}

A document is made from one or more PAGE blocks. Each page contains a list of child blocks for the primary items detected on the page, such as lines of text and tables. For more information, see Pages.

You can determine the type of a Block object by inspecting the BlockType field.

A Block object contains a list of related Block objects in the Relationships field, which is an array of Relationship objects. A Relationships array is either of type CHILD or of type VALUE. An array of type CHILD is used to list the items that are children of the current block. For example, if the current block is of type LINE, Relationships contains a list of IDs for the WORD blocks that make up the line of text. An array of type VALUE is used to contain key-value pairs. You can determine the type of the relationship by inspecting the Type field of the Relationship object.

Child blocks don't have information about their parent Block objects.

For examples that show Block information, see Processing Documents with Synchronous Operations.

Confidence

Amazon Textract operations return the percentage confidence that Amazon Textract has in the accuracy of the detected item. To get the confidence, use the Confidence field of the Block object. A higher value indicates a higher confidence. Depending on the scenario, detections with a low confidence might need visual confirmation by a human.

Geometry

Amazon Textract operations (except for identity analysis) return location information about the location of detected items on a document page. To get the location, use the Geometry field of the Block object. For more information, see Item Location on a Document Page.