zomato digitizes menus using Amazon Textract and Amazon SageMaker

This post is co-written by Chiranjeev Ghai, ML Engineer at zomato. zomato is a global food-tech company based in India.

Are you the kind of person who has very specific cravings? Maybe when the mood hits, you don’t want just any kind of Indian food—you want Chicken Chettinad with a side of paratha, and nothing else will hit the spot! To help picky eaters satisfy their cravings, we at zomato have recently added enhanced search engine capabilities to our restaurant aggregation and food delivery platform. These capabilities enable us to recommend restaurants to zomato users based on searches for specific dishes.

We power this functionality with machine learning (ML), using it to extract and structure text data from menu images. To develop this menu digitization technology, we partnered with Amazon ML Solutions Lab to explore the capabilities of the AWS ML Stack. This post summarizes how we used Amazon Textract and Amazon SageMaker to develop a customized menu digitization solution.

Extracting raw text from menus with Amazon Textract

The first component of this solution was to accurately extract all the text in the menu image. This process is known as optical character recognition (OCR). For our use case, we experimented with both in-house and commercial OCR solutions.

We first created an in-house OCR solution by stacking a pre-trained text detection model and a pre-trained text recognition model. The challenge with these models was that they were trained on a standard text dataset that didn’t match the eclectic fonts found in restaurant menus. To improve system performance, we fine-tuned these models by generating a dataset of 1.5 million synthetic text images that were more representative of text in menus.

After evaluating our in-house solution and several commercial OCR solutions, we found that Amazon Textract offers the best text recognition precision and recall. Restaurants often get creative when designing their menus, so OCR robustness was crucial for this use case. Amazon Textract particularly differentiated itself when processing menus with unique fonts, background images, and low image resolutions. Using it is as simple as making an API call:

#Python 3.6
import boto3
textract_client = boto3.client(
    'textract',
    region_name = '' #insert the AWS region you're working in
)
textract_response = textract_client.detect_document_text(
    Document={
        'S3Object': {
        'Bucket': '', #insert the name of the S3 bucket containing your image
        'Name': '' #insert the S3 key of your image
        }
    }
)

print(textract_response)

The following code is the Amazon Textract output for a sample image:

{'DocumentMetadata': {'Pages': 1},
 'Blocks': [{'BlockType': 'PAGE',
   'Geometry': {'BoundingBox': {'Width': 1.0,
     'Height': 1.0,
     'Left': 0.0,
     'Top': 0.0},
  ...
  {'BlockType': 'WORD',
   'Text': 'Dim',
   'Geometry': {'BoundingBox': {'Width': 0.10242128372192383,
     'Height': 0. 048968635499477386,
     'Left': 0. 24052166938781738,
     'Top': 0. 02556285448372364},
...

The raw outputs are visualized by overlaying them on top of the image. The following image visualizes the preceding raw output. The black boxes are the text-detection bounding boxes provided by Amazon Textract. Extracted text is displayed on the right. Note the unconventional fonts, colors, and images on this menu.

The following image visualizes Amazon Textract outputs for a menu with a different design. Black boxes are the text-detection bounding boxes provided by Amazon Textract. Extracted text is displayed on the right. Again, this menu has unconventional fonts, colors, and images.

Using Amazon SageMaker to build a menu structure detector

The next component of this solution was to group the detections from Amazon Textract by menu section. This enabled our search engine to distinguish between entrees, desserts, beverages, and so on. We framed this as a computer vision problem—object detection, to be precise—and used Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth to collect training data. Ground Truth accelerated this process by providing a fully managed annotation tool that we customized to ask human annotators to draw bounding boxes around every menu section in the image. We used an annotation workforce from AWS Marketplace because this was a niche labeling task, and public labelers from Amazon Mechanical Turk didn’t perform well. With Ground Truth, it took just a few days and approximately $1,400 to label 4,086 images with triplicate redundancy.

With labeled data in hand, we faced a paradox of choice when selecting model-building approaches because object detection is such a thoroughly studied problem. Our choices included:

Removing low-confidence labels from the labeled dataset – Because even human annotators can make mistakes, Ground Truth calculates confidence scores for labels by having multiple annotators (for this use case, three) label the same image. Setting a higher confidence threshold for labels can decrease the noise in the training data at the expense of having less training data.
Data augmentation – Techniques for image data augmentation include horizontal flipping, cropping, shearing, and rotation. Data augmentation can make models more robust by increasing the amount of training data. However, excessive data augmentation may result in poor model convergence.
Feature engineering – From our experience in applying computer vision to processing menus, we had a variety of techniques in mind to emphasize or de-emphasize various aspects of the input images. For example, see the following images.

The following is the original image of a menu.

The following image shows the redacted image (overlay white boxes on a black background where text detections were found).

The following is a text cropped image. On a black background, the image has overlay crops from the original image where text detections were found.

The following is a single channel and text cropped image. The image is encoded as a single RGB channel (for this image, green). You can apply this with other transformations, in this case text cropping.

We also had the following additional model-building methods to choose from:

Model architectures like YOLO, SSD, and RCNN, with VGG or ResNet backbones – Each architecture has different trade-offs of model accuracy, inference time, model size, and more. For this use case, model accuracy was the most important metric because menu images were batch processed.
Using a model pre-trained on a general object detection task or starting from scratch – Transfer learning can be helpful when training complex models on small datasets. However, the task of detecting menu sections is very different from a general object detection task (for example, PASCAL VOC), so the pre-training may not be relevant.
Optimizer parameters – These include learning rate, momentum, regularization coefficients, and early stopping configuration.

With so many hyperparameters to consider, we turned to the automatic tuning feature of Amazon SageMaker to coordinate a massive tuning job across all these variables. The following code is an example of tuning a single model architecture and input data configuration:

import sagemaker
import boto3
from sagemaker.amazon.amazon_estimator import get_image_uri
from sagemaker.estimator import Estimator
from sagemaker.tuner import HyperparameterTuner, IntegerParameter, CategoricalParameter, ContinuousParameter
import itertools
from time import sleep

#set to the region you're working in
REGION_NAME = ''
#set a S3 path for SageMaker to store the outputs of the training jobs 
S3_OUTPUT_PATH = ''
#set a S3 location for your training dataset, 
#assumed to be an augmented manifest file
#see: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/augmented-manifest.html
TRAIN_DATA_LOCATION = ''
#set a S3 location for your validation data, 
#assumed to be an augmented manifest file
VAL_DATA_LOCATION = ''
#specify which fields in the augmented manifest file are relevant for training
DATA_ATTRIBUTE_NAMES = [,]
#specify image shape
IMAGE_SHAPE = 
#specify label width
LABEL_WIDTH = 
#specify number of samples in the training dataset
NUM_TRAINING_SAMPLES = 

sgm_role = sagemaker.get_execution_role()
boto_session = boto3.session.Session(
    region_name = REGION_NAME
)
sgm_session = sagemaker.Session(
    boto_session = boto_session
)
training_image = get_image_uri(
    region_name = REGION_NAME, 
    repo_name = 'object-detection', 
    repo_version = 'latest'
)

#set training job configuration
object_detection_estimator = Estimator(
    image_name = training_image,
    role = sgm_role,
    train_instance_count = 1,
    train_instance_type = 'ml.p3.2xlarge',
    train_volume_size = 50,
    train_max_run = 360000,
    input_mode = 'Pipe',
    output_path = S3_OUTPUT_PATH,
    sagemaker_session = sgm_session
)

#set input data configuration
train_data = sagemaker.session.s3_input(
    s3_data = TRAIN_DATA_LOCATION,
    distribution = 'FullyReplicated',
    record_wrapping = 'RecordIO',
    s3_data_type = 'AugmentedManifestFile',
    attribute_names = DATA_ATTRIBUTE_NAMES
) 

val_data = sagemaker.session.s3_input(
    s3_data = VAL_DATA_LOCATION,
    distribution = 'FullyReplicated',
    record_wrapping = 'RecordIO',
    s3_data_type = 'AugmentedManifestFile',
    attribute_names = DATA_ATTRIBUTE_NAMES
)

data_channels = {
    'train': train_data, 
    'validation' : val_data
}

#set static hyperparameters
#see: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/object-detection-api-config.html
static_hyperparameters = {
    'num_classes' : 1,
    'epochs' : 100,               
    'lr_scheduler_step' : '15,30',      
    'lr_scheduler_factor' : 0.1,
    'overlap_threshold' : 0.5,
    'nms_threshold' : 0.45,
    'image_shape' : IMAGE_SHAPE,
    'label_width' : LABEL_WIDTH,
    'num_training_samples' : NUM_TRAINING_SAMPLES,
    'early_stopping' : True,
    'early_stopping_min_epochs' : 5,
    'early_stopping_patience' : 1,
    'early_stopping_tolerance' : 0.05,
}

#set ranges for tunable hyperparameters
hyperparameter_ranges = {
    'learning_rate': ContinuousParameter(
        min_value = 1e-5, 
        max_value = 1e-2, 
        scaling_type = 'Auto'
    ),
    'mini_batch_size': IntegerParameter(
        min_value = 8, 
        max_value = 64, 
        scaling_type = 'Auto'
    )
}

#Not all hyperparameters are feasible to tune directly
#see: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/object-detection-tuning.html
#For these we run model tuning jobs in parallel using a for loop
#We take this approach for tuning over different model architectures 
#and different feature engineering configurations
use_pretrained_options = [0, 1]
base_network_options = ['resnet-50', 'vgg-16']

for use_pretrained, base_network in itertools.product(use_pretrained_options, base_network_options):
    static_hyperparameter_configuration = {
        **static_hyperparameters, 
        'use_pretrained_model' : use_pretrained, 
        'base_network' : base_network
    }
    
    object_detection_estimator.set_hyperparameters(
        **static_hyperparameter_configuration
    )
    
    tuner = HyperparameterTuner(
        estimator = object_detection_estimator,
        objective_metric_name = 'validation:mAP',
        strategy = 'Bayesian',
        hyperparameter_ranges = hyperparameter_ranges,
        max_jobs = 24,
        max_parallel_jobs = 2,
        early_stopping_type = 'Auto',
    )
    
    tuner.fit(
        inputs = data_channels
    )
    
    print(f'Started tuning job: {tuner.latest_tuning_job.name}')
    
    #wait a bit before starting next job so auto generated names don't conflict
    sleep(60)

This code uses version 1.72.0 of the Amazon SageMaker Python SDK, which is the default version installed in Amazon SageMaker notebook instances. Version 2.X introduces breaking changes. For more information, see Use Version 2.x of the SageMaker Python SDK.

We used powerful GPU hardware (p3.2xlarge instances), and it took us just 1 week and approximately $1,500 to explore 455 unique parameter configurations. Of these configurations, Amazon SageMaker found that a fine-tuned Faster R-CNN model with text cropping performed the best, with a mean average precision score of 0.93. This aligned with results from our prior work in this space, which found that two-stage detectors generally outperform single-stage detectors in processing menus.

The following is an example of how the object detection model processed a menu. In this image, the purple boxes are the predicted bounding boxes from the menu section detection model. Black boxes are the text detection bounding boxes provided by Amazon Textract.

Using Amazon SageMaker to build rule- and ML-based text classifiers

The final component in the solution was a layer of text classification. To enable our enhanced search functionality, we had to know if each detection within a menu section was the menu section title, name of a dish, price of a dish, or something else (such as a description of a dish or the name of the restaurant). To this end, we developed a hybrid rule- and ML-based text classification system.

The first step of the classification was to use a rule to determine if a detection was a price or not. This rule simply calculated the proportion of numeric characters in the detection. If the proportion was greater than 40%, the detection was classified as a price. Although simple, this classifier worked well in practice. We used Amazon SageMaker notebook instances as a convenient interactive environment to develop this and other rules.

After the prices were filtered out, the remaining detections were classified as dish or not dish. From our experience in processing menus, we intuitively knew that in many cases, the location of prices was sufficient to do this classification. For these menus, dishes and prices are listed side by side, so simply classifying detections located to the left of prices as dishes worked well.

The following example shows how the rules-based text classification system processed a menu. Green boxes are detections classified as dishes (by the price location rule). Red boxes are detections classified as not dishes (by the price location rule). Blue boxes are detections classified as prices. Final dish detections are on the right.

Some menus might include lengthy dish descriptions or may not list prices next to individual dishes. These menus violate the assumptions of the price location rules, so we turned to model-based text classification. We used Amazon SageMaker training jobs to experiment with many modeling approaches in parallel, including an XGBoost model trained on hashed word count vectors. In the end, we found that a fine-tuned BERT model from GluonNLP achieved the best performance with an AUROC score of 0.86.

The following image is an example of how the model-based text classification system processed a menu. Green boxes are detections classified as dishes (by the BERT model). Red boxes are detections classified as not dishes (by the BERT model). Blue boxes are detections classified as prices. The final dish detections are on the right.

Of the remaining detections (those not classified as prices or dishes), a final round of classification identified menu section titles. We created features that captured the font size of the detection, the location of the detection on the menu, and the length of the words within the detection. We used these features as inputs to a logistic regression model that predicted if a detection is a menu section title or not.

Key features of Amazon SageMaker

In the end, we found that doing OCR was as simple as making an API call to Amazon Textract. However, our use case required additional customization. We selected Amazon SageMaker as an ML platform to develop this customization because it offered several key features:

Amazon SageMaker Notebooks made it easy to spin up Jupyter notebook environments for prototyping and testing rules and models.
Ground Truth helped us build and deploy a custom image annotation tool with no front-end experience required.
Amazon SageMaker automatic tuning enabled us to run massive hyperparameter tuning jobs on powerful hardware, and included an intuitive interface for tracking the results of hundreds of experiments. You can implement tuning jobs with early stopping conditions, which makes experimentation cost-effective.

Amazon SageMaker offers additional integration benefits from including all the preceding features in a single platform:

Amazon SageMaker Notebooks come pre-installed with all the dependencies needed to build models that can be optimized with automatic tuning.
Ground Truth offers easy access to labelers from Mechanical Turk or AWS Marketplace.
Automatic tuning can directly ingest the manifest files created by Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth.

Putting it all together

Our menu digitization system can extract text from images of menus, group it by menu section, extract the title of the section, extract the dishes within each section, and pair each dish with its price. The following is a visualization of the end-to-end solution.

The workflow contains the following steps:

The input is an image of a menu.
Amazon Textract performs OCR on the input image.
An ML-based computer vision model predicts bounding boxes for menu sections in the menu image.
A rules-based classifier classifies Amazon Textract detections as price or not price.
A rules-based classifier (5a) attempts to use the location of price detections to classify the not price detections as dish or not dish. If this rule doesn’t successfully classify most of the detections on the page, an ML-based classifier is used instead (5b).
The ML-based classifier uses hand-crafted features to classify not dish detections as menu section title or not menu section title.
The menu text is structured by combining the menu section detections and the text classification results.

The following image visualizes a sample output of the system. Green boxes are detections classified as dishes. Blue boxes are detections classified as prices. Yellow boxes are detections classified as menu section titles. Purple boxes are predicted menu section bounding boxes.

The following code is the structured output:

[
   {
      "title":{
         "text":"Shrimp Dishes"
      },
      "dishes":[
         {
            "text":"Shrimp Masala",
            "price":{
               "text":"140"
            }
         },
         {
            "text":"Shrimp Biryani",
            "price":{
               "text":"170"
            }
         },
         {
            "text":"Shrimp Pulav",
            "price":{
               "text":"160"
            }
         }
      ]
   },
   ...
]

Conclusion

We built a system that uses ML to digitize menus without any human input required. This system will improve user experience by powering new features such as advanced dish search and review highlight verification. Our content team will also use it to accelerate creating menus for online ordering.

To explore these capabilities of Amazon Textract and Amazon SageMaker in more depth, see Automatically extract text and structured data from documents with Amazon Textract and Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning: Using Machine Learning for Machine Learning.

The Amazon ML Solutions Lab helped us accelerate our use of ML by pairing our team with ML experts. The ML Solutions Lab brings to every customer engagement learnings from more than 20 years of Amazon’s ML innovations in areas such as fulfillment and logistics, personalization and recommendations, computer vision and translation, fraud prevention, forecasting, and supply chain optimization. To learn more about the AWS ML Solutions Lab, contact your account manager or visit Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab.

About the Authors

Chiranjeev Ghai is a Machine Learning Engineer. In his current role, he has been aiding automation at zomato by leveraging a wide variety of ML optimisations ranging from Image Classification, Product Recommendation, and Text Detection. When not building models, he likes to spend his time playing video games at home.

Ryan Cheng is a Deep Learning Architect in the Amazon ML Solutions Lab. He has worked on a wide range of ML use cases from sports analytics to optical character recognition. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys cooking.

Andrew Ang is a Deep Learning Architect at the Amazon ML Solutions Lab, where he helps AWS customers identify and build AI/ML solutions to address their business problems.

Vinayak Arannil is a Data Scientist at the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab. He has worked on various domains of data science like computer vision, natural language processing, recommendation systems, etc.