mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

PP-OCR: A Practical Ultra Lightweight OCR System

arXiv 2009.09941 ↗First posted 21 Sep 2020cs.CVcited by 147

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Cited by 22 in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been widely used in various of application scenarios, such as office automation (OA) systems, factory automations, online educations, map productions etc. However, OCR is still a challenging task due to the various of text appearances and the demand of computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose a practical ultra lightweight OCR system, i.e., PP-OCR. The overall model size of the PP-OCR is only 3.5M for recognizing 6622 Chinese characters and 2.8M for recognizing 63 alphanumeric symbols, respectively. We introduce a bag of strategies to either enhance the model ability or reduce the model size. The corresponding ablation experiments with the real data are also provided. Meanwhile, several pre-trained models for the Chinese and English recognition are released, including a text detector (97K images are used), a direction classifier (600K images are used) as well as a text recognizer (17.9M images are used). Besides, the proposed PP-OCR are also verified in several other language recognition tasks, including French, Korean, Japanese and German. All of the above mentioned models are open-sourced and the codes are available in the GitHub repository, i.e., https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR.

Key facts. Cited by 147 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 8; 2022: 8; 2023: 17; 2024: 23; 2025: 43; 2026: 48.

147 papers.

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  1. 2023CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agentscited by 692
  2. 2025Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editingcited by 417
  3. 2023Monkey: Image Resolution and Text Label Are Important Things for Large Multi-modal Modelscited by 356
  4. 2023Emu Edit: Precise Image Editing via Recognition and Generation Taskscited by 321
  5. 2024Visual CoT: Advancing Multi-Modal Language Models with a Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 267
  6. 2024VisRAG: Vision-based Retrieval-augmented Generation on Multi-modality Documentscited by 237
  7. 2025PaddleOCR 3.0 Technical Reportcited by 136
  8. 2023GlyphControl: Glyph Conditional Control for Visual Text Generationcited by 127
  9. 2022PP-OCRv3: More Attempts for the Improvement of Ultra Lightweight OCR Systemcited by 105
  10. 2023Talk2BEV: Language-enhanced Bird's-eye View Maps for Autonomous Drivingcited by 88
  11. 2024MME-Survey: A Comprehensive Survey on Evaluation of Multimodal LLMscited by 72
  12. 2025VRAG-RL: Empower Vision-Perception-Based RAG for Visually Rich Information Understanding via Iterative Reasoning with Reinforcement Learningcited by 68
38 more
  1. 2024CogCoM: A Visual Language Model with Chain-of-Manipulations Reasoningcited by 64
  2. 2025A Survey on (M)LLM-Based GUI Agentscited by 61
  3. 2025GUI-G2: Gaussian Reward Modeling for GUI Groundingcited by 60
  4. 2023DocILE Benchmark for Document Information Localization and Extractioncited by 58
  5. 2024ACE: All-round Creator and Editor Following Instructions via Diffusion Transformercited by 56
  6. 2021PP-OCRv2: Bag of Tricks for Ultra Lightweight OCR Systemcited by 39
  7. 2023FinanceMath: Knowledge-Intensive Math Reasoning in Finance Domainscited by 39
  8. 2025DesignDiffusion: High-Quality Text-to-Design Image Generation with Diffusion Modelscited by 37
  9. 2024V-IRL: Grounding Virtual Intelligence in Real Lifecited by 35
  10. 2025POINTS-Reader: Distillation-Free Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Document Conversioncited by 34
  11. 2025LLM-Powered GUI Agents in Phone Automation: Surveying Progress and Prospectscited by 31
  12. 2023AltDiffusion: A Multilingual Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelcited by 30
  13. 2024Enhancing Visual Document Understanding with Contrastive Learning in Large Visual-Language Modelscited by 30
  14. 2025DiMo-GUI: Advancing Test-time Scaling in GUI Grounding via Modality-Aware Visual Reasoningcited by 29
  15. 2025EasyText: Controllable Diffusion Transformer for Multilingual Text Renderingcited by 25
  16. 2023MolGrapher: Graph-based Visual Recognition of Chemical Structurescited by 24
  17. 2025Think Twice, Click Once: Enhancing GUI Grounding via Fast and Slow Systemscited by 23
  18. 2026LightOnOCR: A 1B End-to-End Multilingual Vision-Language Model for State-of-the-Art OCRcited by 22
  19. 2026TextPecker: Rewarding Structural Anomaly Quantification for Enhancing Visual Text Renderingcited by 14
  20. 2023BaDLAD: A Large Multi-Domain Bengali Document Layout Analysis Datasetcited by 13
  21. 2023LISTER: Neighbor Decoding for Length-Insensitive Scene Text Recognitioncited by 13
  22. 2025Region-based Cluster Discrimination for Visual Representation Learningcited by 13
  23. 2025VisR-Bench: An Empirical Study on Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multilingual Long Document Understandingcited by 13
  24. 2026PP-OCRv6: From 1.5M to 34.5M Parameters, Surpassing Billion-Scale VLMs on OCR Taskscited by 12
  25. 2021Efficient Online ML API Selection for Multi-Label Classification Taskscited by 11
  26. 2023Lexi: Self-Supervised Learning of the UI Languagecited by 10
  27. 2024Grounding Partially-Defined Events in Multimodal Datacited by 10
  28. 2025ControlText: Unlocking Controllable Fonts in Multilingual Text Rendering without Font Annotationscited by 10
  29. 2025DianJin-OCR-R1: Enhancing OCR Capabilities via a Reasoning-and-Tool Interleaved Vision-Language Modelcited by 10
  30. 2022Self-Supervised Text Erasing with Controllable Image Synthesiscited by 9
  31. 2023Long-Term Ad Memorability: Understanding & Generating Memorable Adscited by 9
  32. 2024Bridging the Gap Between End-to-End and Two-Step Text Spottingcited by 9
  33. 2024Lumos : Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Scene Text Recognitioncited by 8
  34. 2024AnyTrans: Translate AnyText in the Image with Large Scale Modelscited by 8
  35. 2025OCRGenBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating OCR Generative Capabilitiescited by 8
  36. 2026PP-OCRv5: A Specialized 5M-Parameter Model Rivaling Billion-Parameter Vision-Language Models on OCR Taskscited by 8
  37. 2022TRIE++: Towards End-to-End Information Extraction from Visually Rich Documentscited by 6
  38. 2022HAPI: A Large-scale Longitudinal Dataset of Commercial ML API Predictionscited by 6

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