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
arXiv:2607. 03650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting textual information from scanned medical documents, such as external laboratory reports and manually filled forms, has been a major challenge in modern electronic health records (EHRs).
By Enshuo Hsu, Jin Zhou, Kirk Roberts
arXiv:2610.19551v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Text-to-image models increasingly generate readable Chinese text that still contains local rendering defects, such as a character with an extra or miss...
By Yiyang Chen, Guo-Hua Wang, Yaoli Liu, Qing-Guo Chen, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Xiujun Ma
arXiv:2610.34148v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Optical character recognition (OCR) systems depend strongly on the scale and diversity of their training data. One approach to document OCR first analy...
By Majid Adibian, Hossein Saberi, Hossein Zeinali
arXiv:2607. 24077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a key component in the digitization of historical archives.
By Marina Gardella (CB), Camilo Mari{\~n}o (UDELAR, CB), Diego Belzarena (UDELAR, CB), Ignacio Ram{\'i}rez (UDELAR), Gregory Randall (UDELAR), Jean-Michel Morel (LU - Hong Kong)
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
The paper presents a multi‑stage framework for recognizing Kuzushiji characters in Japanese historical documents. It combines character detection, cropping, classification, reading‑order reconstruction via adaptive column clustering, and large‑language‑model‑based post‑OCR correction. The authors also augment data synthetically, correct dataset annotations, and introduce new test sets, achieving significant character error rate reductions on real, synthetic, and out‑of‑domain data.
By Rui-Yang Ju, Kohei Yamashita, Hirotaka Kameko, Shinsuke Mori
SP-DocReader introduces a self‑play framework for OCR that focuses on residual errors after supervised fine‑tuning. It uses Reading Discrepancy Masking to align reference and generated tokens via a longest common subsequence and scores unmatched positions with full conditioning prefixes. The method adds a Focused Fidelity Loss for direct negative log‑likelihood supervision at unmatched ground‑truth positions, training only the OCR module while keeping the backbone frozen, and achieves significant character error rate reductions and ANLS improvements on multiple backbones.
By Wenjie Liao, Xiaohui Song, Liangjie Zhao, Haonan Lu
The paper "Sorry Robot, Happy Human: Vision-Language Models Read Only One of Two Legible Typographic Layers" reports that vision‑language models (VLMs) struggle to read images containing two overlapping text layers—one with sharp contour lines and one with soft shading. Using the DecoyBench dataset of 300 such images, the authors evaluated six closed‑source VLMs under naive and guided prompting at high and low resolutions. While humans could read both layers accurately, the models reliably read only the contour layer at high resolution and failed to extract the shading layer; at low resolution, neither the models nor humans could read the contour layer, but the shading layer remained readable.
"whyItMatters":"The study highlights a consistent limitation of current VLMs in handling typographic structures with multiple spatial frequency layers, underscoring their vulnerability to typographic attacks and the need for more robust text‑recognition capabilities."
By Mert \.Incidelen, Yamen Kashkash, Asya Berker, Murat Aydo\u{g}an
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
The paper introduces an entity‑aware evaluation framework for OCR systems applied to historical documents, focusing on how well names, dates, and identifiers are preserved. Using a benchmark of 175 Berrutti Archive documents and 5,209 manually annotated entity mentions, the authors compare sequence‑recognition OCR, OCR‑specialized vision‑language models, and general‑purpose vision‑language models. Their results show that OCR rankings vary with the evaluation criterion: Qwen 3.6 achieves the highest entity coverage, while some systems recover many entities when small character‑level errors are tolerated, indicating that aggregate transcription metrics alone do not capture meaningful information preservation.
By Camilo Mari\~no (UDELAR, CB), Diego Belzarena (UDELAR, CB), Marina Gardella (CB), Ignacio Ram\'irez (UDELAR), Gregory Randall (UDELAR), Jean-Michel Morel (LU - Hong Kong)
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-based benchmarks and increasingly focused on text-rich understanding, but their robustness under controlled visual degradation remains insufficiently understood. This gap is critical for OCR reasoning, where visual corruption can induce OCR errors and structural distortions, thereby introducing uncertainty into the reasoning task.