trocr small handwritten

Providermicrosoft
Categoryimage-to-text
LicenseApache-2.0
Downloads193
Stars0

Overview

TrOCR-small is a lightweight transformer-based model designed specifically for optical character recognition of handwritten text. Unlike traditional OCR engines that rely on separate text detection and recognition stages, TrOCR uses an end-to-end encoder-decoder architecture, leveraging a Vision Transformer (ViT) to process images and a language model to generate text. This makes it particularly effective for curved or irregular handwriting where standard OCR often fails. For developers, the 'small' variant offers a critical balance between inference speed and accuracy, making it suitable for edge deployment or real-time applications. It integrates easily into Python pipelines via the Hugging Face Transformers library, allowing for rapid implementation of digitizing workflows, form processing, and archival automation without requiring massive compute resources.

Highlights

  • End-to-end transformer architecture for superior handwriting recognition
  • Lightweight footprint optimized for fast inference and deployment
  • Seamless integration via Hugging Face Transformers library
  • Permissive Apache-2.0 license for commercial application
  • Eliminates need for complex multi-stage OCR pipelines

Usage

Install
# Install Hugging Face transformers
pip install transformers torch
SDK Usage
# Load model with transformers
from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer

model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten")

Hugging Face Download

We recommend downloading the model via the Hugging Face CLI or Hub SDK.

Guidance：Before downloading, install huggingface_hub with:

Guidance 
pip install -U huggingface_hub

CLI Download

Download the full repository

Download the full repository 
huggingface-cli download microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten

Download a single file to a local folder (e.g. config.json into ./dir)

Download a single file to a local folder (e.g. config.json into ./dir) 
huggingface-cli download microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten config.json --local-dir ./dir

See the official docs for more CLI options

SDK Download

SDK Download 
# 模型下载
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
model_dir = snapshot_download('microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten')

Git Download

Make sure git-lfs is installed first

Git Download 
git lfs install
git clone https://huggingface.co/microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten

To skip LFS large-file downloads, use:

Skip LFS 
GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone https://huggingface.co/microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten

Model files are hosted on the Hugging Face Hub — download directly via HF CLI / SDK / Git, not through this site.

PyTorch / Transformers Usage

Install Transformers

Install Transformers 
pip install -U transformers torch

Load the model and run inference

Load the model and run inference 
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained('microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten')
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten')

Model Download

We recommend downloading the model via the ModelScope CLI or SDK.

Guidance：Before downloading, install ModelScope with:

Guidance 
pip install modelscope

CLI Download

Download the full repository

Download the full repository 
modelscope download --model microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten

Download a single file to a local folder (e.g. README.md into ./dir)

Download a single file to a local folder (e.g. README.md into ./dir) 
modelscope download --model microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten README.md --local_dir ./dir

See the docs for more CLI options

SDK Download

SDK Download 
# 模型下载
from modelscope import snapshot_download
model_dir = snapshot_download('microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten')

Git Download

Make sure git-lfs is installed first

Git Download 
git lfs install
git clone https://www.modelscope.cn/microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten.git

To skip LFS large-file downloads, use:

Skip LFS 
GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone https://www.modelscope.cn/microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten.git

ModelScope 模型页直接下载模型文件；无需将模型文件放在本站服务器。

Notebook Quickstart

Install the ModelScope library

Install the ModelScope library 
pip install "modelscope[audio,cv,nlp,multi-modal,science]" -f https://modelscope.oss-cn-beijing.aliyuncs.com/releases/repo.html

Load the model and run inference

Load the model and run inference 
from modelscope.pipelines import pipeline
from modelscope.utils.constant import Tasks

p = pipeline('text-generation', 'microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten')

Full Documentation

来源: HuggingFace

---
tags:

  • trocr

  • image-to-text

widget:
  • src: https://fki.tic.heia-fr.ch/static/img/a01-122-02.jpg

example_title: Note 1
  • src: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSoolxi9yWGAT5SLZShv8vVd0bz47UWRzQC19fDTeE8GmGv_Rn-PCF1pP1rrUx8kOjA4gg&usqp=CAU

example_title: Note 2
  • src: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRNYtTuSBpZPV_nkBYPMFwVVD9asZOPgHww4epu9EqWgDmXW--sE2o8og40ZfDGo87j5w&usqp=CAU

example_title: Note 3
---

TrOCR (small-sized model, fine-tuned on IAM)

TrOCR model fine-tuned on the IAM dataset. It was introduced in the paper TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models by Li et al. and first released in this repository.

Model description

The TrOCR model is an encoder-decoder model, consisting of an image Transformer as encoder, and a text Transformer as decoder. The image encoder was initialized from the weights of DeiT, while the text decoder was initialized from the weights of UniLM.

Images are presented to the model as a sequence of fixed-size patches (resolution 16x16), which are linearly embedded. One also adds absolute position embeddings before feeding the sequence to the layers of the Transformer encoder. Next, the Transformer text decoder autoregressively generates tokens.

Intended uses & limitations

You can use the raw model for optical character recognition (OCR) on single text-line images. See the model hub to look for fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.

How to use

Here is how to use this model in PyTorch:

python
from transformers import TrOCRProcessor, VisionEncoderDecoderModel
from PIL import Image
import requests

load image from the IAM database

url = 'https://fki.tic.heia-fr.ch/static/img/a01-122-02-00.jpg'
image = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw).convert("RGB")

processor = TrOCRProcessor.from_pretrained('microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten')
model = VisionEncoderDecoderModel.from_pretrained('microsoft/trocr-small-handwritten')
pixel_values = processor(images=image, return_tensors="pt").pixel_values


generated_ids = model.generate(pixel_values)
generated_text = processor.batch_decode(generated_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)[0]

BibTeX entry and citation info

bibtex
@misc{li2021trocr,
      title={TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models}, 
      author={Minghao Li and Tengchao Lv and Lei Cui and Yijuan Lu and Dinei Florencio and Cha Zhang and Zhoujun Li and Furu Wei},
      year={2021},
      eprint={2109.10282},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}
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