Definition
The extraction of machine-readable text and structural metadata from image-based or non-selectable document formats to enable ingestion into a RAG pipeline. Architectural trade-off: High-accuracy deep learning OCR models preserve complex layouts and tables better but introduce significant latency and inference costs compared to lightweight, rule-based engines.
The bridge between raw pixels and tokenizable strings for LLM indexing, rather than simple text extraction from digital PDFs.
"A Digital Scribe: Transcribing a photo of an ancient scroll into a typed manuscript so it can be searchable in a modern library."
- Layout Analysis(Component)
- Document Chunking(Dependent Step)
- Multimodal LLMs(Emerging Alternative)
- Vector Embedding(Downstream Consumer)
Conceptual Overview
The extraction of machine-readable text and structural metadata from image-based or non-selectable document formats to enable ingestion into a RAG pipeline. Architectural trade-off: High-accuracy deep learning OCR models preserve complex layouts and tables better but introduce significant latency and inference costs compared to lightweight, rule-based engines.
Disambiguation
The bridge between raw pixels and tokenizable strings for LLM indexing, rather than simple text extraction from digital PDFs.
Visual Analog
A Digital Scribe: Transcribing a photo of an ancient scroll into a typed manuscript so it can be searchable in a modern library.