The paper evaluates open-source OCR, LLM, and VLM systems on a high‑risk public sector task: extracting structured data from student application documents. Results show that VLMs generally outperform OCR+LLM pipelines, yet only 4 of 35 configurations achieve F1 scores above 0.5, with most combinations scoring below 0.25. Model size and input quality, especially preserving OCR structure, are critical factors influencing performance.
By Elias Schubert, Felix Bie{\ss}mann
UniLipi is a unified multi‑script OCR model trained on 13 Indic scripts to recognize handwritten manuscripts under challenging conditions such as varied line geometry, length, and interruptions by non‑textual elements. It uses script‑aware synthetic data generation to perform well even with limited real annotated data. The model also predicts script identity and per‑line character counts, aiding manuscript cataloging, and its representations transfer to contemporary Indic handwriting and several non‑Indic scripts.
By Tathagata Ghosh, Sai Madhusudan Gunda, Simran Singh Sandral, Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla
arXiv:2608.22366v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly being used for document understanding, yet their role in Arabic and Islamic manuscript recognition remai...
By Moshiur Farazi, Firoj Alam, Abderrahmane Maaradji, Zakaria Maamar, Hamdy Mubarak, Wajdi Zaghouani
This systematic literature review examines 97 studies on optical character recognition (OCR) from 2015 to 2025, tracing the evolution of AI models, application domains, data types, and linguistic coverage. It identifies key OCR models, evaluates their performance, strengths, and limitations, and highlights unresolved challenges such as limited resources for underrepresented languages, high variability in handwritten text, and constraints in real‑time applications. The review proposes promising approaches—including self‑supervised learning, multimodal AI, AutoML, AI‑assisted postprocessing, TinyML, and joint corpora creation—to enhance OCR accuracy and address these challenges for industrial use.
By Nuzhat Khan, Ab Al-Hadi Ab Rahman, Shahriyar Masud Rizvi, Ibrahim Yousef Alshareef, Muhammad Nadzir Marsono, Muhammad Paend Bakht, Mohd Shahrizal Rusli, Shahidatul Sadiah
The paper introduces a controlled benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on key‑value pair extraction from documents with varying levels of OCR noise. It tests 136 configurations across five instruction‑tuned open‑weight LLMs, three datasets, and four text‑quality conditions, using deterministic decoding to generate 17,688 document‑level inferences. The study finds that clean‑text performance does not reliably predict real‑world robustness, model rankings can reverse under noisy conditions, and few‑shot demonstrations do not always improve accuracy, highlighting reliability risks in OCR‑to‑LLM pipelines.
By Zahra Anvari
Sinhala is a morphologically rich abugida spoken by roughly 16 million people in Sri Lanka, and to date, there are no publicly available real-world datasets for page-level Sinhala OCR. All previous studies for assessing Sinhala OCR models have used artificially generated data.
arXiv:2606.19096v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: European Portuguese (pt-PT) is largely absent from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) benchmarks, which skew toward high-resource languages. The f...
By Jo\~ao Cardeira, Diogo Gl\'oria-Silva, Manuel Letras da Luz, Rafael Ferreira, Diogo Tavares, David Semedo, Jo\~ao Magalh\~aes
arXiv:2508. 16674v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Medical report understanding from real-world document images is essential for generating patient-facing explanations and enabling structured information exchange in clinical systems.
By Fangxin Shang, Yuan Xia, Dalu Yang, Yahui Wang, Binglin Yang
arXiv:2609.37712v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is evolving from plain-text transcription toward general visual intelligence, requiring models to recognize, loca...
By GuangJian Team, Kaili Huang, Yongshuo Zhang, Bingtao Fu, Changjiang Jiang, Chenfan Qu, Chenfeng Zhang, Fangming Cui, Gaoyang Zhang, Jiangwei Xie, Jianshu Li, Jing Huang, Jingwen Bai, Mingqi Fang, Tao Fang, Weihong Zhang, Wenbo Du, Xiongfei Bai, Xuekang Zhu, Yinan Xia, Zhenming Wang, Jian Liu, Jingjing Liu, Xiang Qi, Weiqiang Wang
arXiv:2607. 03836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite remarkable progress in machine translation, Vision Language Models (VLMs) struggle on historical manuscripts, a domain that stresses core Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities: low-resource transliteration, archaic vocabulary, and noisy input signals.
By Nguyen Kim Hai Bui, Md. Easin Arafat, Tam\'as G\'abor Orosz, Mufti Mahmud
HunyuanOCR-1.5 is a lightweight, end‑to‑end OCR‑specialized vision‑language model that unifies document parsing, text spotting, information extraction, text‑image translation, and multi‑image document understanding. It builds on the HunyuanOCR‑1.0 architecture, improving efficiency with DFlash‑based OCR decoding for faster inference (6.37× Transformer speedup, 2.14× under vLLM) and enhancing capability through an Agentic Data Flow system that autonomously constructs high‑quality training data for long‑tail OCR tasks. The model achieves top‑tier performance on OmniDocBench v1.6 and sets new milestones in ancient‑script OCR, chart/table parsing, multilingual parsing, and hallucination evaluation, while remaining lightweight for deployment.
By Gengluo Li, Xingyu Wan, Shangpin Peng, Weinong Wang, Hao Feng, Yongkun Du, Binghong Wu, Zheng Ruan, Zhiqiong Lu, Liang Wu, Pengyuan Lyu, Huawen Shen, Zibin Lin, Shijing Hu, Jieneng Yang, Hongbing Wen, Guanghua Yu, Hong Liu, Bochao Wang, Can Ma, Han Hu, Chengquan Zhang, Yu Zhou
arXiv:2607. 16203v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Document parsing is a foundational step for document understanding tasks such as visual question answering and key information extraction, as it transforms unstructured scanned images into structured representations by extracting textual, visual, and layout information.
By Zihan Xu, Puzhen Wu, Lawrence Chun Man Lau, Wei Liu, Sirui Li, Yifan Peng, Yihao Ding