Verified

Multi-Format Document Understanding

Hypothesis

A single pipeline can handle PDFs, images, spreadsheets, and handwritten documents with comparable accuracy to format-specific solutions.

Method

Built a document processing pipeline combining OCR, layout analysis, and LLM-based extraction with a unified output schema. Tested against 500 documents across 4 formats.

Findings

Achieved 92% extraction accuracy across formats. The unified schema was the critical design decision — format-specific preprocessing matters less than consistent output structure. Handwriting remains the hardest case (84% accuracy).

Lessons

Unified output schema is more impactful than format-specific preprocessing
Layout analysis improves extraction accuracy by 18% compared to raw text extraction
Handwriting accuracy can be improved to ~90% by providing document context (type, expected fields) to the model

DocumentsAIProcessing