Llama-OCR: Document to Markdown • Hacker News Board

Re: Llama-OCR: Document to Markdown

#101

Post by KetoManx64 » Mon, Nov 18, 2024, 5:16 AM UTC

wriggler wrote: post #100

philips wrote: post #27

I have recently used llama3.2-vision to handle some paper bidsheets for a charity auction and it is fairly accurate with some terrible handwriting. I hope to use it for my event next year. I do find it rather annoying not being able to get it to consistently output a CSV though. ChatGPT and Gemini seem better at doing that but I haven’t tried to automate it. The scale of my problem is about 100 pages of bidsheets and…

I'd love to hear how Handwriting OCR ( https://www.handwritingocr.com ) compares for your task. It's not free, but its accuracy for for handwritten documents is the best out there (I am the founder, so am biased, but I'm really excited about where the accuracy is now). It could save you time and for your 100 page project would cost only $12.

My main qualm with a project like yours is that I have to upload my documents to a third party and trust them with that data. I have a couple thousand pages worth of journal entries from the last decade and I would never upload those to a website to get OCR'd, but with a local Ollama model I have full control of the data and it all stays local.

Re: Llama-OCR: Document to Markdown

#102

Post by bosie » Mon, Nov 18, 2024, 7:46 PM UTC

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #93

bosie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a local rubbish model to extract text. If it doesn’t find any on the back, don’t send it to chatgtp? Terrascan comes to mind

"Terrascan" is a vision model? The only hits I'm getting are for a static code analyzer.

sorry, i meant "Tesseract"

Re: Llama-OCR: Document to Markdown

#103

Post by wriggler » Wed, Nov 20, 2024, 1:12 AM UTC

KetoManx64 wrote: post #101

wriggler wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear how Handwriting OCR ( https://www.handwritingocr.com ) compares for your task. It's not free, but its accuracy for for handwritten documents is the best out there (I am the founder, so am biased, but I'm really excited about where the accuracy is now). It could save you time and for your 100 page project would cost only $12.

My main qualm with a project like yours is that I have to upload my documents to a third party and trust them with that data. I have a couple thousand pages worth of journal entries from the last decade and I would never upload those to a website to get OCR'd, but with a local Ollama model I have full control of the data and it all stays local.

I understand your concern, and it's a common one. However, we can only give assurances in our privacy policy that your data is used only to perform the OCR, and nothing else. You can delete all data from the server immediately after downloading your results and no trace will be left.

Of course a local solution like Ollama is preferable for privacy reasons but, for now, the OCR performance of available local models is just not very good, especially from handwritten documents. With a couple thousand pages of journal entries, that means a lot of post-processing and editing.

Re: Llama-OCR: Document to Markdown

#104

Post by noduerme » Wed, Nov 20, 2024, 1:54 PM UTC

alex_suzuki wrote: post #49

noduerme wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not even close to OCR systems, which are based on analyzing points in a grid for each character stroke and comparing them with known characters. Just for one thing, OCR systems are deterministic. Deterministic . Look it up.

One of my worries for the coming years is that people will forget what deterministic actually means. It terrifies me!

Not to get real dark and philosophical (but here goes) it took somewhere around 150,000 years for humans to go from spoken language to writing. And almost all of those words were irrational. From there to understanding and encoding what is or isn't provable, or is or isn't logically deterministic, took the last few hundred years. And people who have been steeped in looking at the world through that lens (whether you deal with pure math or need to understand, e.g. by running a casino, what is not deterministic, so as to add it to your understanding of volatility and risk) are able to identify which factors in any scenario are deterministic or not very quickly. One could almost say that this ability to discern logic from fuzz is the crowning achievement of science and civilization, and the main adaptation conferred upon some humans since speech. Unfortunately, it is very recent, and it's still an open question as to whether it's an evolutionary advantage to be able to tell the difference between magic and process. And yeah, it's scary to imagine a world where people can't; but that was practically the whole world a few centuries ago, and it wouldn't be terribly surprising if humanity regressed to that as they stopped understanding how to make tools and most people began treating tools like magic again. Sad time to be alive.