optical character recognition
OCRBench v2: An Improved Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models on Visual Text Localization and Reasoning
Scoring the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has witnessed growing interest. Existing benchmarks have highlighted the impressive performance of LMMs in text recognition; however, their abilities in certain challenging tasks, such as text localization, handwritten content extraction, and logical reasoning, remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce OCRBench v2, a large-scale bilingual text-centric benchmark with currently the most comprehensive set of tasks (4 more tasks than the previous multi-scene benchmark OCRBench), the widest coverage of scenarios (31diverse scenarios), and thorough evaluation metrics, with 10,000human-verified questionanswering pairs and a high proportion of difficult samples. Moreover, we construct a private test set with 1,500 manually annotated images. The consistent evaluation trends observed across both public and private test sets validate the OCRBench v2's reliability. After carefully benchmarking state-of-the-art LMMs, we find that most LMMs score below 50 (100 in total) and suffer from five-type limitations, including less frequently encountered text recognition, fine-grained perception, layout perception, complex element parsing, and logical reasoning.
MME-VideoOCR: Evaluating OCR-Based Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs in Video Scenarios
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved considerable accuracy in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) from static images. However, their efficacy in video OCR is significantly diminished due to factors such as motion blur, temporal variations, and visual effects inherent in video content. To provide clearer guidance for training practical MLLMs, we introduce MME-VideoOCR benchmark, which encompasses a comprehensive range of video OCR application scenarios.
Text-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution via Diffusion Model with Joint Segmentation Decoders
The introduction of generative models has significantly advanced image superresolution (SR) in handling real-world degradations. However, they often incur fidelity-related issues, particularly distorting textual structures. In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-based SR framework, namely TADiSR, which integrates text-aware attention and joint segmentation decoders to recover not only natural details but also the structural fidelity of text regions in degraded real-world images. Moreover, we propose a complete pipeline for synthesizing high-quality images with fine-grained full-image text masks, combining realistic foreground text regions with detailed background content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially enhances text legibility in super-resolved images, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation metrics and exhibiting strong generalization to real-world scenarios. Our code is available at here.
OCRBench v2: An Improved Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models on Visual Text Localization and Reasoning
Scoring the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has witnessed growing interest. Existing benchmarks have highlighted the impressive performance of LMMs in text recognition; however, their abilities in certain challenging tasks, such as text localization, handwritten content extraction, and logical reasoning, remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce OCRBench v2, a large-scale bilingual text-centric benchmark with currently the most comprehensive set of tasks ($4\times$ more tasks than the previous multi-scene benchmark OCRBench), the widest coverage of scenarios ($31$ diverse scenarios), and thorough evaluation metrics, with $10,000$ human-verified question-answering pairs and a high proportion of difficult samples. Moreover, we construct a private test set with $1,500$ manually annotated images. The consistent evaluation trends observed across both public and private test sets validate the OCRBench v2's reliability. After carefully benchmarking state-of-the-art LMMs, we find that most LMMs score below $50$ ($100$ in total) and suffer from five-type limitations, including less frequently encountered text recognition, fine-grained perception, layout perception, complex element parsing, and logical reasoning.
US Supreme Court temporarily lifts ban on abortion pill mail delivery
The United States Supreme Court has temporarily reinstated a rule allowing an abortion pill to be prescribed through telemedicine and dispensed through the mail, lifting a judicial ban that narrowed access to the medication nationwide. Justice Samuel Alito issued an interim order on Monday, pausing for one week a decision by the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals to reimpose an older federal rule requiring an in-person clinician visit to receive mifepristone. The Supreme Court's action, called an "administrative stay", gives the justices more time to review emergency requests by two manufacturers of mifepristone to ensure that the drug can be provided via telehealth and the mail while the legal challenge plays out. Alito ordered Louisiana to respond to the drugmakers' requests by Thursday and indicated that the administrative stay would expire on May 11. The court would be expected to extend the interim stay or formally decide the requests by that time.
Meta-Album: Multi-domain Meta-Dataset for Few-Shot Image Classification
We introduce Meta-Album, an image classification meta-dataset designed to facilitate few-shot learning, transfer learning, meta-learning, among other tasks. It includes 40 open datasets, each having at least 20 classes with 40 examples per class, with verified licences. They stem from diverse domains, such as ecology (fauna and flora), manufacturing (textures, vehicles), human actions, and optical character recognition, featuring various image scales (microscopic, human scales, remote sensing). All datasets are preprocessed, annotated, and formatted uniformly, and come in 3 versions (Micro Mini Extended) to match users' computational resources.
SHDocs: A dataset, benchmark, and method to efficiently generate high-quality, real-world specular highlight data with near-perfect alignment
A frequent problem in vision-based reasoning tasks such as object detection and optical character recognition (OCR) is the persistence of specular highlights. Specular highlights appear as bright spots of glare that occur due to the concentrated reflection of light; these spots manifest as image artifacts which occlude computer vision models and are challenging to reconstruct. Despite this, specular highlight removal receives relatively little attention due to the difficulty of acquiring high-quality, real-world data. We introduce a method to generate specular highlight data with near-perfect alignment and present SHDocs--a dataset of specular highlights on document images created using our method. Through our benchmark, we demonstrate that our dataset enables us to surpass the performance of state-of-the-art specular highlight removal models and downstream OCR tasks. We release our dataset, code, and methods publicly to motivate further exploration of image enhancement for practical computer vision challenges.
MatteViT: High-Frequency-Aware Document Shadow Removal with Shadow Matte Guidance
Kim, Chaewon, Lee, Seoyeon, Park, Jonghyuk
Document shadow removal is essential for enhancing the clarity of digitized documents. Preserving high-frequency details (e.g., text edges and lines) is critical in this process because shadows often obscure or distort fine structures. This paper proposes a matte vision transformer (MatteViT), a novel shadow removal framework that applies spatial and frequency-domain information to eliminate shadows while preserving fine-grained structural details. T o effectively retain these details, we employ two preservation strategies. First, our method introduces a lightweight high-frequency amplification module (HF AM) that decomposes and adap-tively amplifies high-frequency components. Second, we present a continuous luminance-based shadow matte, generated using a custom-built matte dataset and shadow matte generator, which provides precise spatial guidance from the earliest processing stage. These strategies enable the model to accurately identify fine-grained regions and restore them with high fidelity. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks (RDD and Kligler) demonstrate that Matte-ViT achieves state-of-the-art performance, providing a robust and practical solution for real-world document shadow removal. Furthermore, the proposed method better preserves text-level details in downstream tasks, such as optical character recognition, improving recognition performance over prior methods.
Enhancing OCR for Sino-Vietnamese Language Processing via Fine-tuned PaddleOCRv5
Nguyen, Minh Hoang, Thiet, Su Nguyen
Recognizing and processing Classical Chinese (Han-Nom) texts play a vital role in digitizing Vietnamese historical documents and enabling cross-lingual semantic research. However, existing OCR systems struggle with degraded scans, non-standard glyphs, and handwriting variations common in ancient sources. In this work, we propose a fine-tuning approach for PaddleOCRv5 to improve character recognition on Han-Nom texts. We retrain the text recognition module using a curated subset of ancient Vietnamese Chinese manuscripts, supported by a full training pipeline covering preprocessing, LMDB conversion, evaluation, and visualization. Experimental results show a significant improvement over the base model, with exact accuracy increasing from 37.5 percent to 50.0 percent, particularly under noisy image conditions. Furthermore, we develop an interactive demo that visually compares pre- and post-fine-tuning recognition results, facilitating downstream applications such as Han-Vietnamese semantic alignment, machine translation, and historical linguistics research. The demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/MinhDS/Fine-tuned-PaddleOCRv5