What is PaddleOCR?
PaddleOCR is a a free open-source, production-ready OCR and document AI engine that delivers end-to-end intelligent document processing, from raw image/text extraction to structured, AI-friendly output (like JSON and Markdown) with high accuracy.
It supports multiple languages, handwriting recognition, and runs efficiently across various hardware.
Key highlights:
- PaddleOCR 3.0 & PaddleOCR-VL: Advanced technical reports showcase improvements in accuracy, layout understanding, and multimodal capabilities.
- MCP Server: Now offers seamless integration with AI agents like Claude Desktop, enabling smarter document workflows.
- New Website (Beta): Features online PDF parsing, free APIs, and MCP services—ideal for developers building RAG systems, document AI apps, and enterprise solutions.
- Widespread Adoption: Trusted by startups and enterprises globally, integrated into tools like MinerU, RAGFlow, Pathway, and Cherry-Studio.
- Open Source Powerhouse: With over 60,000 GitHub stars, it’s the go-to solution for developers seeking reliable, scalable, and privacy-conscious document intelligence in the AI era.
In short: PaddleOCR turns unstructured documents into actionable data, fast, accurately, and at scale.
Features
- PaddleOCR-VL: SOTA 0.9B VLM for document parsing, supports 109 languages, recognizes text, tables, formulas, charts, and handwriting with high accuracy and low resource use.
- PP-OCRv5: Universal multilingual OCR (109 languages), 13% accuracy gain, only 2M parameters, supports Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, Telugu, Tamil.
- PP-StructureV3: Converts complex documents to structured Markdown/JSON, preserves layout and hierarchy, outperforms commercial tools.
- PP-ChatOCRv4: AI-driven information extraction using ERNIE 4.5, 15% accuracy improvement, answers questions directly from documents.
- MCP Server: Integrates with agents like Claude Desktop for intelligent workflows.
- Free Online Tools: Beta website offers large-scale PDF parsing, free API, and MCP services.
- Full Dev Suite: Training, inference, deployment tools; compatible with Hugging Face and ModelScope.
- Note: PaddleOCR 3.x is not backward compatible with 2.x.
Awesome Projects Leveraging PaddleOCR
- RAGFlow: RAG engine powered by deep document understanding.
- pathway: Python ETL framework for stream processing, real-time analytics, and LLM/RAG pipelines.
- MinerU: Tool for converting multi-type documents into structured Markdown.
- Umi-OCR: Free, open-source, batch offline OCR software.
- cherry-studio: Desktop client supporting multiple LLM providers.
- OmniParser: Screen parsing tool for vision-based GUI agents.
- QAnything: Question-and-answer system that works with any document.
- PDF-Extract-Kit: Open-source toolkit for extracting high-quality content from complex PDFs.
- Dango-Translator: Real-time screen text recognition, translation, and overlay display.
License
Apache 2.0 License
