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DeepSeek OCR

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990 points pierre | 1 comments | 20 Oct 25 06:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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pietz ◴[20 Oct 25 08:49 UTC] No.45641449[source]▶
My impression is that OCR is basically solved at this point.

The OmniAI benchmark that's also referenced here wasn't updated with new models since February 2025. I assume that's because general purpose LLMs have gotten better at OCR than their own OCR product.

I've been able to solve a broad range of OCR tasks by simply sending each page as an image to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and asking it nicely to extract the content in Markdown under some additional formatting instructions. That will cost you around $0.20 for 1000 pages in batch mode and the results have been great.

I'd be interested to hear where OCR still struggles today.

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1. veidr ◴[21 Oct 25 01:24 UTC] No.45651460[source]▶
Clearly-printed text to a sequence of characters is solved, for use cases that don't require 100% accuracy.

But not for semantic document structure — recognizing that the grammatically incomplete phrase in a larger font is a heading, recognizing subheadings and bullet lists, tables, etc.

Also not for handwritten text, text inside of images (signage and so forth), or damaged source material (old photocopies and scans created in the old days).

Those areas all seem to me where an LLM-based approach could narrow the gap between machine recognition and humans. You have to sort of reason about it from the context as a human to figure it out, too.