Show HN: Benchmarking VLMs vs. Traditional OCR

3 points by themanmaran a day ago

Vision models have been gaining popularity as a replacement for traditional OCR. Especially with Gemini 2.0 becoming cost competitive with the cloud platforms.

We've been continuously evaluating different models since we released the Zerox package last year (https://github.com/getomni-ai/zerox). And we wanted to put some numbers behind it. So we’re open sourcing our internal OCR benchmark + evaluation datasets.

Full writeup + data explorer here: https://getomni.ai/ocr-benchmark

Github: https://github.com/getomni-ai/benchmark

Huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/getomni-ai/ocr-benchmark

Couple notes on the methodology:

1. We are using JSON accuracy as our primary metric. The end goal is to evaluate how well each OCR provider can prepare the data for LLM ingestion.

2. This methodology differs from a lot of OCR benchmarks, because it doesn't rely on text similarity. We believe text similarity measurements are heavily biased towards the exact layout of the ground truth text, and penalize correct OCR that has slight layout differences.

3. Every document goes Image => OCR => Predicted JSON. And we compare the predicted JSON against the annotated ground truth JSON. The VLMs are capable of Image => JSON directly, we are primarily trying to measure OCR accuracy here. Planning to release a separate report on direct JSON accuracy next week.

This is a continuous work in progress! There are at least 10 additional providers we plan to add to the list.

The next big roadmap items are: - Comparing OCR vs. direct extraction. Early results here show a slight accuracy improvement, but it’s highly variable on page length.

- A multilingual comparison. Right now the evaluation data is english only.

- A breakdown of the data by type (best model for handwriting, tables, charts, photos, etc.)