An Overview of Data Extraction From Invoices

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the process for information retrieval from invoices. Invoices serve as proof of purchase and contain important information, including the date, description, quantity, and the price of goods or services, as well as the terms of payment. Companies must process invoices quickly and accurately to maintain proper financial records. To automate this workflow, commercial systems have been developed. Despite the complexity involved, realizing automated processing of invoices necessitates the harmonious integration of a wide range of techniques and methods. While several surveys have shed light on different aspects of this workflow, our objective in this paper is to present a synthetic view of the process and emphasize the most pertinent challenges. We discuss the digitalization of invoices and the use of natural language processing techniques to extract relevant information. We also review machine learning and deep learning techniques that are widely used to handle the variability of layouts, minimize end-user tasks, and train and adapt to new contexts. The purpose of this overview is not to evaluate various systems and algorithms, but rather to propose a survey that reviews a wide scope of techniques for different data extraction tasks, addressing both information extraction and structure recognition for invoice processing. Specifically, we focus on table processing, paying particular attention to graph-based approaches.