Open Source Python OCR Software

PaddleOCR offers exceptional, multilingual, and practical Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools that can help users train better models and apply them into practice. Inspired by PaddlePaddle, PaddleOCR is an ultra lightweight OCR system, with multilingual recognition, digit recognition, vertical text recognition, as well as long text recognition. It features a PPOCR series of high-quality pre-trained models, which includes: ultra lightweight ppocr_mobile series models, general ppocr_server series models, and ultra lightweight compression ppocr_mobile_slim series models. PaddleOCR is easy to install and easy to use on Windows, Linux, MacOS and other systems.

DeepSeek-OCR is an open-source optical character recognition solution built as part of the broader DeepSeek AI vision-language ecosystem. It is designed to extract text from images, PDFs, and scanned documents, and integrates with multimodal capabilities that understand layout, context, and visual elements beyond raw character recognition. The system treats OCR not simply as “read the text” but as “understand what the text is doing in the image”—for example distinguishing captions from body text, interpreting tables, or recognizing handwritten versus printed words. It supports local deployment, enabling organizations concerned about privacy or latency to run the pipeline on-premises rather than send sensitive documents to third-party cloud services. The codebase is written in Python with a focus on modularity: you can swap preprocessing, recognition, and post-processing components as needed for custom workflows.

GLM-OCR is an open-source multimodal optical character recognition (OCR) model built on a GLM-V encoder–decoder foundation that brings robust, accurate document understanding to complex real-world layouts and modalities. Designed to handle text recognition, table parsing, formula extraction, and general information retrieval from documents containing mixed content, GLM-OCR excels across major benchmarks while remaining highly efficient with a relatively compact parameter size (~0.9B), enabling deployment in high-concurrency services and edge environments. The model’s multimodal capabilities allow it to reason across image and text content holistically, capturing structured and unstructured information from pages that include dense tables, seals, code snippets, and varied document graphics. GLM-OCR integrates a comprehensive SDK and inference toolchain that makes it easy for developers to install, invoke, and embed into production pipelines with simple commands or APIs.

DeepSeek-OCR-2 is the second-generation optical character recognition system developed to improve document understanding by introducing a “visual causal flow” mechanism, enabling the encoder to reorder visual tokens in a way that better reflects semantic structure rather than strict raster scan order. It is designed to handle complex layouts and noisy documents by giving the model causal reasoning capabilities that mimic human visual scanning behavior, enhancing OCR performance on documents with rich spatial structure. The repository provides model code and inference scripts that let researchers and developers run and benchmark the system on both images and PDFs, with support for batch evaluation and optimized pipelines leveraging vLLM and transformers.

HunyuanOCR is an open-source, end-to-end OCR (optical character recognition) Vision-Language Model (VLM) developed by Tencent‑Hunyuan. It’s designed to unify the entire OCR pipeline, detection, recognition, layout parsing, information extraction, translation, and even subtitle or structured output generation, into a single model inference instead of a cascade of separate tools. Despite being fairly lightweight (about 1 billion parameters), it delivers state-of-the-art performance across a wide variety of OCR tasks, outperforming many traditional OCR systems and even other multimodal models on benchmark suites. HunyuanOCR handles complex documents: multi-column layouts, tables, mathematical formulas, mixed languages, handwritten or stylized fonts, receipts, tickets, and even video-frame subtitles. The project provides code, pretrained weights, and inference instructions, making it feasible to deploy locally or on a server, and to integrate with applications.