Hacker News Reader

Anyone knows when Microsoft will release a local OCR model officially? I haven't seen anyone talking about this, but the one they're shipping with Snipping Tool (OneOcr) is top-tier and beats everything out there like Tesseract, easyOCR etc.

The model is technically in everyone's Windows installs, but we don't have the C++ projected WinRT headers to use the Microsoft.Windows.Vision library.

View on HN

Seems they've released a bunch already?

Image-to-text models, filtered by "Microsoft": https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=image-to-text&sor...

Wow, very nice! Thank you, hadn't come across them in my search.

It looks like it doesn't recognize more than one line at once, but combined with another model or algorithm to detect text bounding boxes it'd be handy.

Not sure if it's what's used in the Azure Document Intelligence service, but my experience with it is pretty good.

The one somewhat unique offering in Azure is the Document Layout model which gives you back the OCR with titles, headers, paragraphs, and tables all labeled.

This is really, really good for RAG since it's often useful to stuff the nearest header into the chunk of text when generating an embedding (much, much better results this way).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com