4 karma · joined August 9, 2024
I'm currently planning to develop a tool to correct Arabic outputs for ASR and OCR. It will function like spell-correction but with a focus specifically on these two areas. Perhaps you could start something similar for Japanese? English (and Latin languages in general) perform at a different level across multiple tasks, to be honest...
For example, I'm deploying tahweel to one of my webapps to allow limited number of users to run OCR on PDF files. I'm using a small CPU machine for this, deploying Surya will not be the same and I think you are facing similar issues in https://www.datalab.to.
As a result, I developed a Python package called tahweel (https://github.com/ieasybooks/tahweel), which leverages Google Cloud Platform's Service Accounts to run OCR and provides page-level output. With the default settings, it can process a page per second. Although it's not open-source, it outperforms the other solutions by a significant margin.
For example, OCRing a PDF file using Surya on a machine with a 3060 GPU takes about the same amount of time as using the tool I mentioned, but it consumes more power and hardware resources while delivering worse results. This has been my experience with Arabic OCR specifically; I'm not sure if English OCR faces the same challenges.