Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2501.11623

Early evidence of how LLMs outperform traditional systems on OCR/HTR tasks for historical records

Seorin Kim·Julien Baudru·Wouter Ryckbosch·Hugues Bersini·Vincent Ginis
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We explore the ability of two LLMs -- GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 -- to transcribe historical handwritten documents in a tabular format and compare their performance to traditional OCR/HTR systems: EasyOCR, Keras, Pytesseract, and TrOCR. Considering the tabular form of the data, two types of experiments are executed: one where the images are split line by line and the other where the entire scan is used as input. Based on CER and BLEU, we demonstrate that LLMs outperform the conventional OCR/HTR methods. Moreover, we also compare the evaluated CER and BLEU scores to human evaluations to better judge the outputs of whole-scan experiments and understand influential factors for CER and BLEU. Combining judgments from all the evaluation metrics, we conclude that two-shot GPT-4o for line-by-line images and two-shot Claude Sonnet 3.5 for whole-scan images yield the transcriptions of the historical records most similar to the ground truth.

Explore related subjects

cs.CVcs.AIcs.LG

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Seorin Kim, Julien Baudru, Wouter Ryckbosch, Hugues Bersini, Vincent Ginis. 2025-01-20. Early evidence of how LLMs outperform traditional systems on OCR/HTR tasks for historical records. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11623

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

PanoSeg3R: Feed-Forward 3D Semantic Segmentation for Panoramic Images with an Automatic Data Curation Pipeline

We present PanoSeg3R, a feed-forward framework for 3D panoramic semantic segmentation. Unlike existing methods designed for perspective inputs, PanoSeg3R jointly predicts 3D geometry and multi-view semantic segmentation in one single forward pass. Built upon a pretrained reconstruction backbone that supports panoramic images, our approach extends feed-forward 3D reconstruction with a query-based mask decoder. Furthermore, we introduce an automatic panorama data curation pipeline that leverages the complementary strengths of off-the-shelf foundation models to generate reliable pseudo semantic annotations, substantially expanding the training data and improving zero-shot generalization. PanoSeg3R achieves state-of-the-art performance on panoramic 3D semantic segmentation, improving 3D mIoU by up to 16.02 on ScanNet++, while the curated training data further improves zero-shot performance by up to 4.26 and 43.28 mIoU on Stanford2D3D and ToF-360, respectively. Website: https://harryyoon777.github.io/PanoSeg3R/

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Vision2CAD: A Visual Agent Harness for Explicit Geometry Referencing and Localization in Parametric CAD Modeling

Generating parametric CAD models requires accurate geometry and stable feature dependencies. Existing methods face challenges in selecting geometric references, interpreting sketch-plane local coordinates, and establishing sketch constraints to projected external geometry. We present Vision2CAD, a visual agent harness that combines vision-language model (VLM) reasoning with deterministic CAD kernel operations. An ID-based interface supports explicit geometry selection, a local-coordinate bridge converts view coordinates into sketch coordinates, and projected-edge localization supports external sketch constraints. These mechanisms establish feature dependencies within the supported modeling operations and constraint types. We also introduce the Geometry Explicit Reference Dataset (GERD), which aligned commands, geometry states and IDs at every modeling step. On GERD-EVL and a DeepCAD test subset, Vision2CAD improves mIoU by 11.1\% and 5.6\% and reduces Chamfer distance by 17.3\% and 41.8\%, respectively. Parameter-editing experiments and ablation studies further proved the preservation of parametric dependencies.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

DOA-SORT: Directional Occlusion-Aware Multi-Object Tracking with Distributional Observations

Identity association in multi-object tracking (MOT) is vulnerable to partial occlusion, truncated detections, and fluctuating confidence scores. Existing motion-dominant trackers commonly represent occlusion as a scalar penalty. This treatment misses the directional observation bias caused by occlusion: left, right, top, and bottom occlusions distort the location and shape of a detection in different ways. We propose \ours{} (Directional Occlusion-Aware SORT), an online and training-free tracker that models these biases explicitly. First, it infers a soft front--back ordering from box overlap and relative bottom positions, and estimates directional occlusion coverage and depth. It then constructs a mixture of one clean and four directional occlusion observation components. The model uses a five-dimensional observation comprising box center, area, confidence, and aspect ratio, and adapts observation noise to predicted occlusion and detection confidence. The directional mixture likelihood is used in high-confidence association, low-confidence association, and track recovery; ambiguity penalties and local order-consistency swaps further reduce identity errors among nearby objects. On the DanceTrack validation split, \ours{} improves HOTA from 63.00 to 66.34, AssA from 45.10 to 49.57, and IDF1 from 62.19 to 65.28 over OA-SORT with the same detector and evaluation protocol. The gains are concentrated in association quality while detection accuracy remains stable. Additional local evaluations on MOT17 and MOT20 train splits characterize cross-dataset behavior under the same no-ReID tracking protocol.

cs.CV↗