CascadeTabNet VS donut

Recently, I've been researching extracting tables from image documents. First I tried with pdfs, however, the data extraction libraries like camelot are inconsistent. I found a deep learning model called CascadeTabNet. The detection results are okay but cell recognition is poor. I even found Multi-Type-TD-TSR for table extraction. It uses image processing techniques to find the grids. It performs well on structured and bordered tables. However, it messes up if the cell is not properly aligned. Even if extraction is successful, aggregation of multi-line cells, i.e post-processing, is not very obvious.

maybe this is better? https://github.com/clovaai/donut

I'm not sure

Yup! But I'm still exploring options. (any recommendations would be welcomed!) Here are some candidates I'm considering:

- https://github.com/mindee/doctr

- https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmocr

- https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR (honestly I don't know Mandarin so I'm a bit stuck)

- https://github.com/clovaai/donut - While it's primarily an "OCR-free document understanding transformer," I think it's worth experimenting with. Think I can sort this out by letting the LLM reason through it multiple times (although this will impact performance)

- yesterday got a suggestion to consider https://github.com/kakaobrain/pororo - I don't think development is still active but the results are pretty great on Korean text

I am also interested in experimenting with something like DONUT (https://github.com/clovaai/donut) but I have never seen anything on what the VRAM expectations are for something like this. Does anyone know also if there are any newer better models than this for document parsing as well? Or what the VRAM requirements for something like this tend to be?

Here are a few useful resources you could start with: [Pix2Struct by Google Research](https://github.com/google-research/pix2struct) might be a valuable tool, although it will most likely need some fine-tuning to fit your specifics. You can also find some fine-tuned models on HuggingFace by searching 'pix2struct'. Another option worth considering is [DonutI](https://github.com/clovaai/donut). Like Pix2Struct, fine-tuning likely needed to meet your requirements. Tesseract OCR is another alternative, particularly for handling text. It's primarily designed for pages of text, think books, but with some tweaking and specific flags, it can process tables as well as text chunks in regions of a screenshot. Bit too much tweaking for my taste. As I'm also in search of OCR tools for UI and chart screenshots, so share if you find something else.