Overview
PaddleOCR is an open-source OCR toolkit maintained by the PaddlePaddle team, designed for engineering-friendly, scalable image-to-structured-data solutions. It covers full pipeline capabilities including text detection, recognition, orientation classification, layout analysis and structured information extraction. PaddleOCR supports batch processing of images and PDFs and outputs structured results suitable for downstream models (e.g., RAG/LLM). The project balances accuracy and inference efficiency, offering pre-trained models and deployment examples for server and edge scenarios.
Key Features
- Multilingual support: Covers 100+ languages and diverse fonts.
- End-to-end pipeline: Detection, recognition, orientation, layout/table analysis and structured output.
- Engineering oriented: Model zoo, examples, and tools for compression and quantization.
- High performance: Optimizations for CPU/GPU and mobile deployment.
Use Cases
- Batch document scanning and OCR pipelines (invoices, IDs, contracts).
- PDF content extraction and structuring for knowledge retrieval and RAG.
- Image text recognition and table parsing feeding downstream understanding tasks.
- Real-time text recognition on mobile or industrial devices.
Technical Highlights
- Deep-learning based detection and recognition models with multiple architectures and post-processing strategies.
- Model library and compression/quantization tooling for production deployment and tuning.
- Apache-2.0 licensed, active community, and comprehensive documentation and examples.