[8organicbits]

I think there are multiple possible goals we could imagine in text recognition tasks. Should the AI guess the occluded text? That could be really helpful in some instances. But if the goal is OCR, then it should only recognize characters optically, and any guessing at occluded characters is undesired.

[abecedarius]

Maybe a better goal is some representation for "COCONUT [with these 3 letters occluded]". Then the consumer might combine this with other evidence about the occluded parts, or review it if questions come up about how accurate the OCR was in this case.