PDF Data Extractor

PDF data extractor can be used to extract any kind of required data from image based PDFs.

Current Purpose - Currently it is being used to extract phone numbers from the PDFs.

SETUP

All steps should be followed from project root :

• Install latest Python release (3.9.5 at the time of writing).
  Download Python
• Add Python to your system path if on windows
  Add to Path
• Install pip
  • Windows
  • Mac
• Install virtualenv with
  pip install virtualenv
• Create a virtual env in the project root with
  virtualenv env
• Install all dependencies with
  pip install -r requirements.txt
• Install tesseract on your system
  • Windows
  • brew install tesseract on Mac

GET STARTED

• After installing all the dependencies activate the virtual enviroment with
  • source env/bin/activate on Mac
  • env\Scripts\activate on Windows
• After activation, in the command line enter
  export FLASK_APP=app and export FLASK_ENV=development
• Now run with
  flask run
• Server runs at localhost:5000

HOW TO USE

• Once the server is running on localhost:5000, open in browser, upload the PDF and submit.

  Average time - 1 min/mb (PDF file)

• Alternatively, send a HTTP POST request to /phonenumbers with form-data field named 'file' and attach the PDF to it.

HOW IT WORKS

• The given PDF is scanned and converted to png images using PyMuPDF library.
• These images are then evaluated with pytesseract which uses tesseract-OCR under the hood to recognize letters from images (OCR technology).
• We then pass the extracted text through our function which filters out phone numbers.

Various other functions can be used to extract other kinds of data from PDF.