File analysis solutions can analyze text-based documents for risk, but PII can also reside in other forms of data. Performing file analysis on scanned documents, recorded conversations, and video conference recordings is becoming increasingly common. Some file analysis solutions can process these files prior to applying PII discovery techniques.
Scanned paper documents stored as images (inside a PDF file, for example) should be processed with optical character recognition (OCR) to extract the text and, ideally, the associated structural information. Many organizations keep scanned ID documents on record, such as employees’ driver's licenses or passports.
File analysis solutions that support analyzing audio or video recordings require processing by a speech-to-text engine that can create a written transcript for analysis.