Designing Production-Scale OCR for India: Multilingual and Domain-Specific Systems

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Autori principali: Faraz, Ali, Kolla, Raja, Kulkarni, Ashish, Agarwal, Shubham
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Faraz, Ali
Kolla, Raja
Kulkarni, Ashish
Agarwal, Shubham
author_facet Faraz, Ali
Kolla, Raja
Kulkarni, Ashish
Agarwal, Shubham
contents Designing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems for India requires balancing linguistic diversity, document heterogeneity, and deployment constraints. In this paper, we study two training strategies for building multilingual OCR systems with Vision-Language Models through the Chitrapathak series. We first follow a popular multimodal approach, pairing a generic vision encoder with a strong multilingual language model and training the system end-to-end for OCR. Alternatively, we explore fine-tuning an existing OCR model, despite not being trained for the target languages. Through extensive evaluation on multilingual Indic OCR benchmarks and deployment-oriented metrics, we find that the second strategy consistently achieves better accuracy-latency trade-offs. Chitrapathak-2 achieves 3-6x speedup over its predecessor with being state-of-the-art (SOTA) in Telugu (6.69 char ANLS) and second best in the rest. In addition, we present Parichay, an independent OCR model series designed specifically for 9 Indian government documents to extract structured key fields, achieving 89.8% Exact Match score with a faster inference. Together, these systems achieve SOTA performance and provide practical guidance for building production-scale OCR pipelines in the Indian context.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_16430
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Designing Production-Scale OCR for India: Multilingual and Domain-Specific Systems
Faraz, Ali
Kolla, Raja
Kulkarni, Ashish
Agarwal, Shubham
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Designing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems for India requires balancing linguistic diversity, document heterogeneity, and deployment constraints. In this paper, we study two training strategies for building multilingual OCR systems with Vision-Language Models through the Chitrapathak series. We first follow a popular multimodal approach, pairing a generic vision encoder with a strong multilingual language model and training the system end-to-end for OCR. Alternatively, we explore fine-tuning an existing OCR model, despite not being trained for the target languages. Through extensive evaluation on multilingual Indic OCR benchmarks and deployment-oriented metrics, we find that the second strategy consistently achieves better accuracy-latency trade-offs. Chitrapathak-2 achieves 3-6x speedup over its predecessor with being state-of-the-art (SOTA) in Telugu (6.69 char ANLS) and second best in the rest. In addition, we present Parichay, an independent OCR model series designed specifically for 9 Indian government documents to extract structured key fields, achieving 89.8% Exact Match score with a faster inference. Together, these systems achieve SOTA performance and provide practical guidance for building production-scale OCR pipelines in the Indian context.
title Designing Production-Scale OCR for India: Multilingual and Domain-Specific Systems
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16430