PP-OCR: A Practical Ultra Lightweight OCR System

TL;DR

PP-OCR is a highly compact and efficient OCR system capable of recognizing multiple languages with a model size under 4MB, suitable for diverse practical applications.

Contribution

This paper introduces PP-OCR, a lightweight OCR system with strategies to significantly reduce model size while maintaining high recognition accuracy across multiple languages.

Findings

Model size is only 3.5MB for Chinese characters

Achieved high accuracy in multilingual OCR tasks

Open-sourced models and code for broad accessibility

Abstract

The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been widely used in various of application scenarios, such as office automation (OA) systems, factory automations, online educations, map productions etc. However, OCR is still a challenging task due to the various of text appearances and the demand of computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose a practical ultra lightweight OCR system, i.e., PP-OCR. The overall model size of the PP-OCR is only 3.5M for recognizing 6622 Chinese characters and 2.8M for recognizing 63 alphanumeric symbols, respectively. We introduce a bag of strategies to either enhance the model ability or reduce the model size. The corresponding ablation experiments with the real data are also provided. Meanwhile, several pre-trained models for the Chinese and English recognition are released, including a text detector (97K images are used), a direction classifier (600K images are used) as well as a text recognizer (17.9M images are used). Besides, the proposed PP-OCR are also verified in several other language recognition tasks, including French, Korean, Japanese and German. All of the above mentioned models are open-sourced and the codes are available in the GitHub repository, i.e., https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR.