Definition
The systematic extraction of textual content and structural metadata from image-based documents to transform unstructured visual data into machine-readable formats for chunking and vectorization. In RAG, high-fidelity OCR is critical for preserving semantic meaning in tables and complex layouts to prevent 'garbage in, garbage out' embedding quality.
In AI pipelines, OCR is the ingestion gateway for legacy files, distinct from the LLM's natural language understanding.
"A digital transcriber converting a photograph of a library book into a searchable text file so it can be indexed by a computer."
- Layout Analysis(Component)
- Data Ingestion(Prerequisite)
- Chunking(Dependent Step)
- Multimodal LLM(Alternative)
Conceptual Overview
The systematic extraction of textual content and structural metadata from image-based documents to transform unstructured visual data into machine-readable formats for chunking and vectorization. In RAG, high-fidelity OCR is critical for preserving semantic meaning in tables and complex layouts to prevent 'garbage in, garbage out' embedding quality.
Disambiguation
In AI pipelines, OCR is the ingestion gateway for legacy files, distinct from the LLM's natural language understanding.
Visual Analog
A digital transcriber converting a photograph of a library book into a searchable text file so it can be indexed by a computer.