PaddleOCR VS txtai

PyTesseract Module [ Github ] EasyOCR Module [ Github ] PaddlePaddle OCR [ Github ]

My default recommendation for OCR is https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR but most of the examples there are not handwritten - so I'm not sure how well it'll handle it this time.

Other than EasyOCR and Tesseract, PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR) is probably the most well known open-source OCR solution.

What are you planning to do with the text after detecting / recognizing it? How fast does the detection / recognition need to be in order to be useful?

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

For images with text, if you want to do visual qa, document classification, table/key information extraction, checkout https://huggingface.co/blog/document-ai https://github.com/philschmid/document-ai-transformers https://github.com/google-research/pix2struct https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/release/2.6/ppstructure/README.md

EasyOCR is a popular project if you are in an environment where you can use run Python and PyTorch (https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR). Other open source projects of note are PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR) and docTR (https://github.com/mindee/doctr).

I think you can train tesseract with custom data if you have enough, or you can use deep learning models like https://pyimagesearch.com/2020/08/17/ocr-with-keras-tensorflow-and-deep-learning or https://www.google.com/amp/s/nanonets.com/blog/attention-ocr-for-text-recogntion/amp/ or try other existing tools like paddle-ocr https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR

https://huggingface.co/blog/document-ai https://github.com/microsoft/table-transformer https://github.com/google-research/pix2struct https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/release/2.6/ppstructure/table/README.md

when following the installation commands present in the paddleocr repo(https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/release/2.6/doc/doc_en/quickstart_en.md) im still unable to install paddleocr. paddlepaddle is successfully installed on my m1 mac with python3.9.16 but while installing paddleocr im getting this error after long pip backtracking

When I was evaluating options a few months ago I found https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR to be a very strong contender for my use case (reading product labels), but you'll definitely want to put together some representative docs/images and test a bunch of solutions to see what works for you.

I tend to agree with this sentiment. Many junior devs and/or those in college want to contribute. Then they feel entitled to merge a PR that they worked hard on often without guidance. I'm all for working with people but projects have standards and not all ideas make sense. In many cases, especially with commercial open source, the project is the base of a companies identity. So it's not just for drive-by ideas to pad a resume or finish a school project.

For those who do want to do this, I'd recommend writing an issue and/or reaching out to the developers to engage in a dialogue. This takes work but it will increase the likelihood of a PR being merged.

Disclaimer: I'm the primary developer of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai), an open-source vector database + RAG framework

txtai is an all-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows.

Bootstrapping only works if you have the runway to do it and you don't feel the need to grow fast.

With NeuML (https://neuml.com), I've went the bootstrapping route. I've been able to build a fairly successful open source project (txtai 6K stars https://github.com/neuml/txtai) and a revenue positive company. It's a "live within your means" strategy.

VC funding can have a snowball effect where you need more and more. Then you're in the loop of needing funding rounds to survive. The hope is someday you're acquired or start turning a profit.

I would say both have their pros and cons. Not all ideas have the luxury of time.

I agree that in many cases people are puffing their feathers to try to be something they're not (at least not yet). Some believe in the fake it until you make it mentality.

With NeuML (https://neuml.com), the website is a simple HTML page. On social media, I'm honest about what NeuML is, that I'm in my 40s with a family and not striving to be the next Steve Jobs. I've been able to build a fairly successful open source project (txtai 6K stars https://github.com/neuml/txtai) and a revenue positive company. For me, authenticity and being genuine is most important. I would say that being genuine has been way more of an asset than liability.

I'll add txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai) to the list.

There is still plenty of room for innovation in this space. Just need to focus on the right projects that are innovating and not the ones (re)working on problems solved in 2020/2021.

txtai is an all-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows.

Nice project! I've long used Tika for document parsing given it's maturity and wide number of formats supported. The XHTML output helps with chunking documents for RAG.

Here's a couple examples:

- https://neuml.hashnode.dev/build-rag-pipelines-with-txtai

- https://neuml.hashnode.dev/extract-text-from-documents

Disclaimer: I'm the primary author of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai).