The internet has accumulated a lot of knowledge in the form of PDFs. Some of these are digital-native PDFs, while others are just wrappers around images. Until now, there hasn't been much demand for parsing these PDFs in a structured way.

Document parsing has become much more popular in recent years. We wanted to leverage all that accumulated data to train our LLMs. This fueled interest in building OCR systems that understand tables, images, and mathematical formulas well.

At Numeo, we process around 50,000 freight documents (Rate Cons, BOLs, etc.) daily. I've been researching how to improve our document processing pipeline, and my research results surprised me quite a bit.

It turns out all top 5 OCR solutions/models come from China, according to the OmniDocBench (https://github.com/opendatalab/OmniDocBench).

China is cooking...