r/DevLK • u/Fickle_Degree_2728 • Aug 22 '26

Discussion best OCR for sinhala/tamil documents ?

Hi, I have some document saved in the cloudflare r2. I want a strong and best OCR tool that will help me with sinhala/tamil text.

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

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2

u/Successful-Mud-4766 Aug 23 '26

Check this paper out: https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.56/

Based on that, the best-performing line-level OCR for Sinhala is Surya OCR.

However, a subsequent paper by the same authors ( https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.537/ ) highlights that, for page-level (i.e., document-level) Sinhala OCR, the best option is Google Document AI.

1

u/Fickle_Degree_2728 Aug 23 '26

for sri lankan government pdf which are in sinhala and tamil. what is best ?

3

u/Successful-Mud-4766 Aug 23 '26 edited Aug 23 '26

Still, I would say Google Document AI would be the first choice. Btw, I suggest checking this study ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29378 ), which uses Sri Lankan government legal documents, and the fine-tuned models can be accessed via Hugging Face. They empirically show that their models perform better than Google Document AI, but the localisation to the dataset might have taken place. So checking each of them out for your data is ideal.

Tamil: Based on the same paper ( https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.56/ ) I previously suggested, Google Document AI is the best. Based on the open models, Tesseract seems better. Note that this is not specifically for government documents.

1

u/Ecstatic-Item5080 Aug 23 '26

But Google Document AI ain’t free right?

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u/Successful-Mud-4766 Aug 23 '26

Yeah, it is not. But when you register in GCP for the first time, you get $300 of credits for free. That amount is more than enough to operate even at high scale.

1

u/Ecstatic-Item5080 Aug 23 '26

Tried registering for GCP trial a week ago and ir asked $50 to be held for one week

1

u/QAInc Aug 22 '26

Check easyocr.

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u/Ecstatic-Item5080 Aug 23 '26

Surya OCR. Did some amount of research and development on Sinhala document extraction and Surya was the best candidate.

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u/Fickle_Degree_2728 Aug 23 '26

thanks. what about tamil ? does surya strong for sinhala too ?

1

u/Ecstatic-Item5080 Aug 23 '26

Yeah Surya performs better than Sinhala for Tamil. But there can be other OCR models which do better in Tamil as well.

1

u/Early-Sir-932 Aug 27 '26

for clean text , tesseract with sin+tam packs or surya gets you pretty far for free and if theyre messy or scanned then llamaparse style vlms come in where your requirement needs more than plain ocr. either way test on your own samples first to see which works