Benchmarking VLMs vs. Traditional OCR
Vision models have been gaining popularity as a replacement for traditional OCR. Especially with Gemini 2.0 becoming cost competitive with the cloud platforms. We've been continuously evaluating different models since we released the Zerox package last year (https://github.com/getomni-ai/zerox). And we wanted to put some numbers behind it. So we’re open sourcing our internal OCR benchmark + evaluation datasets. Full writeup + data explorer here: https://getomni.ai/ocr-benchmark Github: https://github.com/getomni-ai/benchmark Huggingface:…
In plain words
An open-source OCR benchmark and evaluation dataset that compares vision language models against traditional OCR systems. Created for developers and researchers evaluating optical character recognition tools, it measures model performance using JSON accuracy to assess how well different OCR providers prepare data for large language model processing. The benchmark includes real evaluation datasets and a data explorer, supporting the comparison of newer vision models like Gemini 2.0 with established OCR platforms.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Vision models have been gaining popularity as a replacement for traditional OCR. Especially with Gemini 2.0 becoming cost competitive with the cloud platforms. We've been continuously evaluating different models since we released the Zerox package last year (https://github.com/getomni-ai/zerox). And we wanted to put some numbers behind it. So we’re open sourcing our internal OCR benchmark + evaluation datasets. Full writeup + data explorer here: https://getomni.ai/ocr-benchmark Github: https://github.com/getomni-ai/benchmark Huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/getomni-ai/ocr-benchmark Couple notes on the methodology: 1. We are using JSON accuracy as our primary metric. The end goal is to evaluate how well each OCR provider can prepare the data for LLM ingestion. 2. This methodology differs from a lot of OCR benchmarks, because it doesn't rely on text similarity. We believe text similarity measurements are heavily biased towards the exact layout of the ground truth text, and penalize correct OCR that has slight layout differences. 3. Every document goes Image => OCR => Predicted JSON. And we compare the predicted JSON against the annotated ground truth JSON. The VLMs are capable of Image => JSON directly, we are primarily trying to measure OCR accuracy here. Planning to release a separate report on direct JSON accuracy next week. This is a continuous work in progress! There are at least 10 additional providers we plan to add to the list. The next big roadmap items are: - Comparing OCR vs. direct extraction. Early results here show a slight accuracy improvement, but it’s highly variable on page length. - A multilingual comparison. Right now the evaluation data is english only. - A breakdown of the data by type (best model for handwriting, tables, charts, photos, etc.)
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