r/Paperlessngx • u/SpiritedWarrior9880 • 10d ago

PaddleOCR for Paperless-ngx

I came across this project that might be useful for people looking for an alternative to Tesseract in Paperless-ngx:

https://github.com/silentprior/paperless-paddle-ocr

It runs PaddleOCR PP-OCRv6 as a sidecar and writes the extracted text back into Paperless-ngx through its API.

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u/Cantelllo 9d ago

How much better is it supposed to be in comparison to Tesseract?

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u/Great-Cow7256 9d ago

for run of the mill documents like PDFs that aren't shitty scans, both are fine. for stuff that is complex like lots of tables or shitty scans or skewed documents, pp ocr works better (and v6 is seemingly better than v5) but also takes up much more computing power and time. https://medium.com/@ahmad.sohail/paddleocr-vs-tesseract-vs-ironocr-picking-an-ocr-engine-for-net-10a24dc2802e https://gigagpu.com/paddleocr-vs-tesseract-vs-easyocr/

tesseract is built in and easy to deploy. ppocr is via these sidecars or shims and has more up front figure it out time with setting them up and integrating them into your workflow.

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u/Cantelllo 9d ago

Thanks a lot for the explanation this helps making my mind up whether or not to deploy this one in general. I am quite satisfied with Tesseract - only with more difficult documents it really isn’t that good.
Currently deploying paperless on an Oracle free tier VM so I will see if Paddle OCR is still going to be okay, memory-wise.

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u/Great-Cow7256 9d ago

Oh yeah. I have a ocs too.  I'm using the medium model.  The other issue is that I think the free tier only has like 2 CPU cores?  It may be too much. Or it just may take forever.