What Azure resources can identify duplicate documents within a single pdf file?

Question

I am working on a project that involves processing pdf files which may contain duplicate documents. I need to identify these duplicates. Are there any Azure resources that can help me accomplish this task? Thank you.

Answer 1

Hello @Destin Hebert

Thanks for reaching out to us, do you mean you have a lot of documents which are PDF and some of them are duplicates, or you have a lot of PDF which contains duplicates content? There is not a one simple service can accomplish this task, so you may consider combine two services to make it together.

For the first cases, there are several options you can considerate -

1. Azure Cognitive Services: Specifically, the Text Analytics API could help you extract text from your PDF files and analyze it for processing. However, to handle PDF files, you may need to convert them into text format first using libraries like PyPDF2 or PDFBox.
2. Azure Logic Apps: You can use this service to automate the process of checking and identifying duplicates. This service can be integrated with other Azure services and external APIs, so it could be used in combination with Azure Cognitive Services.
3. Azure Machine Learning: If you need to perform more complex analysis, Azure Machine Learning can be used to build and deploy models that can help identify duplicate documents based on their contents.
4. Azure Search: It helps you in running text-based search queries over structured and unstructured data. You may use this service to create an index of your documents and perform searches to find potential duplicates.

Remember that identifying duplicate documents can be a complex task, especially if the documents are not identical but contain similar information. You may need to use machine learning techniques to identify these 'near duplicates'.

Please note that while these services may assist in the process, you may need to write custom code or use third-party libraries to fully implement your solution.

For some information mentioned on above comment about Azure Form Recognizer -

Azure Form Recognizer is a cognitive service that uses machine learning technology to identify and extract key-value pairs and table data from form documents. Form Recognizer service is designed to extract information from forms rather than identify duplicate documents. It doesn't provide an out-of-the-box feature to detect duplicate documents.

Just for your information, if you can share more details about your scenario, community may provide better thoughts here. I hope this helps.

Regards,

Yutong

-Please kindly accept the answer and vote 'Yes' if you feel helpful to support the community, thanks a lot.