CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A company's application receives images from users and needs to detect and blur any credit card numbers visible in the images for compliance. Which AWS AI service provides document text extraction from images?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Amazon Rekognition's ability to detect text in images (via its DetectText API) with Amazon Textract's specialized document text extraction, but Rekognition is optimized for general scene text (e.g., signs, labels) and lacks the layout analysis and key-value extraction capabilities needed for compliance-grade document processing.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Amazon Textract
Amazon Textract is specifically designed to extract text, including handwritten and printed text, from scanned documents and images. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) by using machine learning to identify and extract key-value pairs, tables, and form data, making it the correct choice for extracting credit card numbers from images for compliance processing.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon Rekognition
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Rekognition does offer a DetectText API that can locate and extract on-screen words from images, but it is not purpose-built for document processing. Rekognition is designed primarily for object detection, face recognition, and content moderation in images and video, and while it can identify text-like blocks, it lacks Textract's understanding of forms, tables, key-value pairs, and document structure. For a task that involves extracting the full content of an uploaded document, this service is the wrong first choice.
- ✓
Amazon Textract
Why this is correct
Amazon Textract is the intended solution because it uses machine learning to automatically extract printed and handwritten text, key-value pairs, and table structures from scans, PDFs, and images. Unlike basic OCR, Textract understands the layout of the page, so it can preserve relationships between elements, such as which value belongs to which form field, and returns data in a structured JSON format. It is the only AWS service here whose core purpose is converting documents into structured digital text.
- ✗
Amazon Comprehend
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing service that operates on text already in plain text form; it cannot read or ingest image or PDF files. Its capabilities include sentiment analysis, entity recognition, language detection, and topic modeling, all of which require an initial text extraction step to be performed by another service. Since the scenario requires pulling text directly out of an image, Comprehend would be dependent on a successful prior extraction and is therefore not the right answer.
- ✗
Amazon Macie
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Macie is a data security service designed to discover sensitive data such as PII and financial information in S3 objects, using pattern matching and machine learning. It works by scanning files stored in S3 and does not provide a general-purpose OCR capability for images or documents; its output is about protecting data and generating alerts, not about regenerating document content. Therefore, Macie cannot be used to extract the text from the uploaded document in this question.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.