[cratermoon]

Agree wholeheartedly. Modern OCR is astonishingly good, more importantly it's deterministically so. It's failure modes, when it's unable to read the text, are recognizably failures.

Results for VLM accuracy & precision are not good. https://arxiv.org/html/2406.04470v1#S4

[VeejayRampay]

which solutions would you classify as "modern OCR"

are we talking tesseract or something?

[criddell]

Probably something like Apple Vision Framework or Amazon Textract or Google's Cloud Vision.

Tesseract does well under ideal conditions, but the world is messy.

[cratermoon]

I was thinking ABBYY FineReader, but those, too. Instead of using VLMs or any sort of generative AI, they're build on good old-fashioned feature extraction and nearest neighbor classifiers such as the k-nearest neighbors algorithm. It's possible to build a working prototype of this technique using basic ML algorithms.