You have a Microsoft Foundry project that contains an agent. The agent uses Azure Al Search as the retriever. You plan to ingest PDFs into an Azure…

To process images embedded in PDFs with the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) skill, the Azure AI Search indexer must first extract these images during the document cracking phase. This is achieved by configuring the indexer's imageAction parameter to generateNormalizedImages. This setting instructs the indexer to create a normalizedimages collection within the enrichment tree for each document. This collection contains the extracted image data in a structured format that the built-in OCR skill is designed to accept as its input (/document/normalizedimages/), enabling the extraction of text from the images.

A. The content field contains the extracted text from the PDF, not the image data. The OCR skill requires image data as input, not text.

B. The outputFieldMappings parameter is used to map the output of a skill to a field in the search index, not to provide the input to the skill.

D. A Shaper skill is used to reshape or restructure data that already exists within the enrichment tree. It does not perform the initial extraction of images from the source document.

1. Microsoft Documentation, "How to crack documents during indexing in Azure AI Search": Under the section "Working with images," it states: "An indexer can extract images from source documents... This behavior is controlled by the imageAction configuration setting in an indexer definition." It further explains that setting imageAction to generateNormalizedImages "creates an array of normalized images... This array is added to the enrichment tree as a normalizedimages node, and you can map it as an input to the OCR skill or other skills that process images."

Source: Microsoft Learn, learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-indexer-image-extraction

2. Microsoft Documentation, "OCR skill in an Azure AI Search skillset": In the "@inputs" section of the skill definition example, it specifies the typical input path: "context": "/document/normalizedimages/". This confirms that the OCR skill is designed to consume the normalizedimages collection generated by the indexer.

Source: Microsoft Learn, learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/cognitive-search-skill-ocr#skill-inputs

3. Microsoft Documentation, "Indexer parameters in Azure AI Search": This document details the indexer's configuration parameters. It lists imageAction and describes the generateNormalizedImages value as the method to "Extracts images from the content... and makes them available in a normalizedimages field."

Source: Microsoft Learn, learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-indexer-parameters#configuration-parameters