Partitioning strategies

For certain document types, such as images and PDFs, for example, Unstructured products offer a variety of different ways to preprocess them, controlled by the strategy parameter.

PDF documents, for example, vary in quality and complexity. In simple cases, traditional NLP extraction techniques may be enough to extract all the text out of a document. In other cases, advanced image-to-text models are required to process a PDF. You can think of the strategies as being “rule-based” workflows (thus they are “fast”), or “model-based” workflows (slower workflow because it requires model inference, but you get “higher resolution”, thus “hi_res”). When choosing a partitioning strategy for your files, you have to be mindful of the quality/speed trade-off. To give you an example, the fast strategy is roughly 100x faster than leading image-to-text models.

Available options:

• auto (default strategy): The “auto” strategy will choose the partitioning strategy based on document characteristics and the function kwargs.
• fast: The “rule-based” strategy leverages traditional NLP extraction techniques to quickly pull all the text elements. “Fast” strategy is not recommended for image-based file types.
• hi_res: The “model-based” strategy identifies the layout of the document. The advantage of “hi_res” is that it uses the document layout to gain additional information about document elements. We recommend using this strategy if your use case is highly sensitive to correct classifications for document elements.
• ocr_only: Another “model-based” strategy that leverages Optical Character Recognition to extract text from the image-based files.

These strategies are available on the following partition functions:

Document Type	Partition Function	Strategies	Table Support	Options
Images (.png/.jpg/.heic)	partition_image	“auto”, “hi_res”, “ocr_only”	Yes	Encoding; Include Page Breaks; Infer Table Structure; OCR Languages, Strategy
PDFs (.pdf)	partition_pdf	“auto”, “fast”, “hi_res”, “ocr_only”	Yes	Encoding; Include Page Breaks; Infer Table Structure; Max Partition; OCR Languages, Strategy