Need OCR API for scanned PDFs with tables and key-value pairs

If you need OCR for scanned PDFs specifically with tables and key-value pairs, you want a document OCR/extraction API rather than a basic text OCR API.

Best API options

1. Google Document AI

• Very strong for:
  • scanned PDFs
  • table extraction
  • form/key-value extraction
  • structured outputs
• Good when you need high accuracy and flexible document processing.
• Supports async processing for large PDFs.

2. AWS Textract

• Great for:
  • forms
  • tables
  • key-value pairs
  • scanned PDFs and images
• Returns structured JSON, including:
  • words/lines
  • tables
  • key-value relationships
• Good if you are already on AWS.

3. Azure AI Document Intelligence

• Strong OCR + layout extraction.
• Good for:
  • tables
  • forms
  • paragraphs
  • key-value pairs
• Easy to integrate and has pretrained models for receipts, invoices, etc.

4. ABBYY FlexiCapture / Vantage

• Enterprise-grade document extraction.
• Excellent for complex scanned documents and noisy scans.
• Often chosen for high-volume business workflows.

5. Open-source / self-hosted

If you want to avoid cloud vendor lock-in:

• PaddleOCR + table models
• Tesseract + custom table/form logic
• docTR
• LayoutParser These usually require more engineering and are less accurate out of the box for tables/key-value pairs.

Best choice by use case

• Best overall for scanned PDFs with tables/forms: AWS Textract or Google Document AI
• Best Microsoft stack option: Azure Document Intelligence
• Best enterprise/high accuracy: ABBYY
• Best self-hosted: PaddleOCR + layout/table extraction pipeline

What to look for in the API

Make sure the API supports:

• PDF upload / async batch processing
• table structure extraction
• key-value/form extraction
• bounding boxes / page coordinates
• confidence scores
• multi-page scanned PDF support
• JSON output

My recommendation

If you want a practical default:

• AWS Textract if you need forms + tables and want straightforward JSON
• Google Document AI if document variety is high and accuracy matters a lot

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a comparison table of these APIs,
2. a sample Python integration, or
3. help you choose based on your budget / cloud provider / document type.