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Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Optical Character Recognition in Dynamic Video Environments

10 Feb 2025arXiv:2502.06445archive 2025-07-28

Sankalp Nagaonkar, Augustya Sharma, Ashish Choithani, Ashutosh Trivedi

This paper introduces an open-source benchmark for evaluating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tasks in dynamic video environments. We present a curated dataset containing 1,477 manually annotated frames spanning diverse domains, including code editors, news broadcasts, YouTube videos, and advertisements. Three state of the art VLMs - Claude-3, Gemini-1.5, and GPT-4o are benchmarked against traditional OCR systems such as EasyOCR and RapidOCR. Evaluation metrics include Word Error Rate (WER), Character Error Rate (CER), and Accuracy. Our results highlight the strengths and limitations of VLMs in video-based OCR tasks, demonstrating their potential to outperform conventional OCR models in many scenarios. However, challenges such as hallucinations, content security policies, and sensitivity to occluded or stylized text remain. The dataset and benchmarking framework are publicly available to foster further research.

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create_directories video-db/ocr-benchmark/utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 015f577fe7e3a945 · report
get_user_input video-db/ocr-benchmark/ground_truth_preparation/create_videodb_collection.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 455082ff52cb2cd1 · report
get_videos_from_directory video-db/ocr-benchmark/ground_truth_preparation/create_videodb_collection.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 5a715afca734373e · report
get_videos_from_json video-db/ocr-benchmark/ground_truth_preparation/create_videodb_collection.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 1e8e72ab0fd3a12a · report
setup_logging video-db/ocr-benchmark/utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 588aaa1e437f6e28 · report

Tasks

BenchmarkingOptical Character RecognitionOptical Character Recognition (OCR)

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection GPT-4o Average Accuracy 76.22 #1 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection GPT-4o Character Error Rate (CER) 0.2378 #1 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection GPT-4o Word Error Rate (WER) 0.5117 #1 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection Gemini-1.5 Pro Average Accuracy 76.13 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection Gemini-1.5 Pro Character Error Rate (CER) 0.2387 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection Gemini-1.5 Pro Word Error Rate (WER) 0.2385 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection Claude-3 Sonnet Average Accuracy 67.71 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection Claude-3 Sonnet Character Error Rate (CER) 0.3229 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection Claude-3 Sonnet Word Error Rate (WER) 0.4663 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection RapidOCR Average Accuracy 56.98 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection RapidOCR Character Error Rate (CER) 0.7620 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection RapidOCR Word Error Rate (WER) 0.4302 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection EasyOCR Average Accuracy 49.30 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection EasyOCR Character Error Rate (CER) 0.5070 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) VideoDB's OCR Benchmark Public Collection EasyOCR Word Error Rate (WER) 0.8262 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report

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