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DeepSeek OCR

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61–70 of 252 posts

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#61
post #42

My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point. The OmniAI benchmark that's also referenced here wasn't updated with new models since February 2025. I assume that's because general purpose LLMs have gotten better at OCR than their own OCR product. I've been able to solve a broad range of OCR tasks by simply sending each page as an image to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and asking it nicely to extract the content…

No way it's solved. try to make OCR over a magazine with creative layouts. Not possible. I have a collection of vintage computer magazines and from time to time I try to OCR them whith the state of the art mechanisms. All of them requiere a lot of human intervention

Could you provide an example that fails? I'm interested in this.

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#62

>先天下之忧而忧 How is this an example of a prompt? Google translated this to "Worry about the world first" while Bing says "Worry before the worries of the world." Can anyone shed some light on this saying or why it's in the article?

[deleted]

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#63
post #42

My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point. The OmniAI benchmark that's also referenced here wasn't updated with new models since February 2025. I assume that's because general purpose LLMs have gotten better at OCR than their own OCR product. I've been able to solve a broad range of OCR tasks by simply sending each page as an image to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and asking it nicely to extract the content…

OCR of printed text may be one thing, but handwriting OCR (a.k.a HTR) is very, very far from solved. It's actually hard to find a practical task general historical HTR is good enough to do usefully, even for state of the art models.

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#64
post #42

My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point. The OmniAI benchmark that's also referenced here wasn't updated with new models since February 2025. I assume that's because general purpose LLMs have gotten better at OCR than their own OCR product. I've been able to solve a broad range of OCR tasks by simply sending each page as an image to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and asking it nicely to extract the content…

VLLMs suck at complex layouts and there is a high risk of hallucination. Never use alone for contracts or health data.

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#65
post #46
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point. Not really in practice to me. Especially they still struggle with Table format detection.

This. Any complex parent table span cell relationship still has low accuracy. Try the reverse, take a complex picture table and ask Chatgpt5, claude Opus 3.1, Gemini Pro 2.5 to produce a HTML table. They will fail.

Maybe my imagination is limited or our documents aren't complex enough, but are we talking about realistic written documents? I'm sure you can take a screenshot of a very complex spreadsheet and it fails, but in that case you already have the data in structured form anyway, no?

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#66
post #36

The paper makes no mention of Anna’s Archive. I wouldn’t be surprised if DeepSeek took advantage of Anna’s offer granting OCR researchers access to their 7.5 million (350 TB) Chinese non-fiction collection ... which is bigger than Library Genesis. https://annas-archive.org/blog/duxiu-exclusive.html

hahaha also immediately thought of this, wonder when the ocr'd dataset would be getting released

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#68
Language support is not mentioned in the repo. But from the paper, it offers extensive multilingual support (nearly 100 languages) which is good, but I need to test it to see how it compares to Gemini and Mistral OCR.

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#69
post #60
post #42

My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point. The OmniAI benchmark that's also referenced here wasn't updated with new models since February 2025. I assume that's because general purpose LLMs have gotten better at OCR than their own OCR product. I've been able to solve a broad range of OCR tasks by simply sending each page as an image to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and asking it nicely to extract the content…

Lot's of OCR/ LLM's (Even Gemini Pro 2.5) still struggle converting complex tables to markdown or HTML: Tables with multiple headers and merged cells that get mixed up, multiple columns with tick boxes get mixed up, multi page tables that are not understood correctly. Also Llamaindex fails miserably on those things. Curious to hear which OCR/ LLM excels with these specific issues? Example complex table: https://cdn.a…

I threw in the first image/table into Gemini 2.5 Pro letting it choose the output format and it looks like it extracted the data just fine. It decided to represent the checkboxes as "checked" and "unchecked" because I didn't specify preferences.

Re: DeepSeek OCR

#70
post #41

Kinda reminds me of PaddleOCR. Would be awesome if DeepSeek OCR could be integrated into a mobile app someday. That’d make OCR way more convenient!

iOS already have on device both text detector and document scanner in apple Vision API. Hard to say how good are they compared to LLM based solutions. Similarly google had MLKit with OCR working on devices also for many years.
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