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Show HN: OCR Arena – A playground for OCR models

ocrarena.ai

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Re: Show HN: OCR Arena – A playground for OCR models

#51
I'm very impressed by the models, to the point I was wondering if they were really converting the pdf or just reading the content. I tried on documents in french, english and spanish, very heaving on graphics and with complex layouts (boardgame, flyer, book about rust), and I wasn't expecting anything great. Especially some models were showing symbols and smileys quite close from the original.

I noticed that some models were resisting better to faking data than other, especially I saw that in a sentence cut from the document, GPT5 was inventing the end of the sentence and opus was properly showing it cut.

I didn't try with my writing but in the playground there is one example and some models read it better than me.

I wish the output would show the confidence of the model on each part. I think it would help immensely.

Note that sometimes a model get stuck in a loop, preventing to vote and to see which model is which

Re: Show HN: OCR Arena – A playground for OCR models

#52
post #29

I suggest you make explicit the assumption that this website is specifically about English text. Otherwise the leaderboard is pretty meaningless, with extreme differences in performance across other scripts - and potentially even languages such as Vietnamese or Czech which use Latin but have lots of accents.

That's unfortunate because I have a bunch of photos with handwritten German on the back that I need to transcribe, and seeing as that I can't read German I can't really do it by myself either.

from my first tests it does fine with german, at least for the gastly "handwritten" font the restaurant menu I used for the test uses.

Re: Show HN: OCR Arena – A playground for OCR models

#57

Most of these are general LLM’s and not specifically OCR models. Where is Google Vision, Mistral, Paddle, Nanonets, or Chandra??

We wanted to keep the focus on (1) foundation VLMs and (2) open source OCR models. We had Mistral previously but had to remove it because their hosted API for OCR was super unstable and returned a lot of garbage results unfortunately. Paddle, Nanonets, and Chandra being added shortly!

MistralOCR works stably for me when first uploading the file to their server and then running the OCR. I also had some issues before when giving a URL directly to the OCR API, not sure if you're doing that?
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