We present CloudScan; an invoice analysis system that requires zero configuration or upfront annotation. In contrast to previous work, CloudScan does not rely on templates of invoice layout, instead it learns a single global model of invoices that naturally generalizes to unseen invoice layouts. The model is trained using data automatically extracted from end-user provided feedback. This automatic training data extraction removes the requirement for users to annotate the data precisely. We describe a recurrent neural network model that can capture long range context and compare it to a baseline logistic regression model corresponding to the current CloudScan production system. We train and evaluate the system on 8 important fields using a dataset of 326,471 invoices. The recurrent neural network and baseline model achieve 0.891 and 0.887 average F1 scores respectively on seen invoice layouts. For the harder task of unseen invoice layouts, the recurrent neural network model outperforms the baseline with 0.840 average F1 compared to 0.788.
Automatic information extraction from scanned business documents is especially valuable in the application domain of document archiving. But current systems for automated document processing still require a lot of configuration work that can only be done by experienced users or administrators. We present an approach for information extraction which purely builds on end-user provided training examples and intentionally omits efficient known extraction techniques like rule based extraction that require intense training and or information extraction expertise. Our evaluation on a large corpus of business documents shows competitive results of above 85 F1-measure on 10 commonly used fields like document type, sender, receiver and date. The system is deployed and used inside the commercial document management system DocuWare. In this paper we present an incremental framework aimed at extracting field information from administrative document images in the context of a Digital Mail-room scenario. Given a single training sample in which the user has marked which fields have to be extracted from a particular document class, a document model representing structural relationships among words is built. This model is incrementally refined as the system processes more and more documents from the same class. A reformulation of the tf-idf statistic scheme allows to adjust the importance weights of the structural relationships among words. We report in the experimental section our results obtained with a large dataset of real invoices.