Guide to OCR Using the Latest Open Models

With the advancement of Vision Language Models (VLMs), OCR technology has evolved beyond simple text extraction to the level of understanding document structure and answering questions.

Key Model Capabilities

• Transcription: Converts handwriting, mathematical formulas, chemical formulas, etc. into machine-readable formats such as Markdown or HTML.
• Complex Element Handling: Recognizes the positions of tables, charts, and images and generates captions to preserve the document's layout. OlmOCR and PaddleOCR-VL are representative examples.
• Document QA and Retrieval: Beyond simple OCR, enables Visual Document Retrieval and Document QA.

Model Selection and Build Strategy Depending on the use case, you need to decide whether to fine-tune a model directly or use it out of the box. The key is to select the optimal model by considering cost efficiency, privacy protection, and the model's output format (DocTags, HTML, Markdown, etc.).