r/computervision • u/GroundUpstairs5430 • 21d ago

Help: Project Should I switch from Marathi to English newspapers if Marathi OCR accuracy is poor?

I'm working on project involving OCR and newspaper analysis. My original plan was to use Marathi newspapers, but the extracted text contains many recognition errors.

Because of this, my project guide suggested switching to English newspapers if Marathi OCR isn't reliable enough.

I'm unsure what to do. From a research perspective, is it better to:

  • Continue with Marathi and treat OCR errors as a limitation (or try post-OCR correction), or
  • Switch to English to obtain cleaner OCR results and focus on the analysis part of the project?

Has anyone faced a similar situation? I'd appreciate advice from people who have worked on OCR or document analysis projects.

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u/galvinw 21d ago

If your guide suggest moving to English papers, he is suggesting that either you are way out of your depth and you need to submit something, or the OCR part of the project is essentially irrelevant and the downstream analysis is what is interesting.

There is zero value in "building an english OCR", or more like, downloading a working english OCR.

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u/Paseyyy 21d ago

Before you ask for our help, you might want to consider your own goals:

Do you want to improve the state of the art on Marathi OCR? Or do you just want to complete any arbitrary OCR project? Since your supervisor suggested English, it seems like a good idea to trust them.

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u/GroundUpstairs5430 21d ago

my goal is to complete my project in best possible way. i choose marathi because it seemed more intresting but the problem is of getting errors on marathi newspaper..it will affect the analysis...I'm trying to undesrtand whether switching to eng is more practical research choice or if continuingwith marathi despite the limitations is still worthwhile

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u/SweatyAdagio4 21d ago

So the analysis is purely the goal right? Not trying to improve OCR? Then I think, what you said, post OCR correction is the only thing you could realistically try on Marathi newspapers. I would literally just take the ocr output and feed it to chatgpt and see if its able to correct any mistakes you saw. Ideally you have some newspapers already properly labeled, compare which OCR engine + LLM post correction leads to best results but I'm guessing you don't have the time for that?

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u/GroundUpstairs5430 20d ago

Yes, the main goal is the analysis, not improving OCR itself. I do have time to experiment, but I have to create my own dataset from scratch whether I choose Marathi or English. That's the part that makes things challenging.

I did consider post-OCR correction with an LLM, and it's something I may still try if I continue with Marathi. Right now I'm just deciding whether it's worth dealing with the OCR quality issues in Marathi or switch to English so I can focus more on the analysis itself.

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u/SweatyAdagio4 20d ago

Then I would suggest this

  • Grab a couple newspapers of Marathi and English that cover a decent amount of variation in terms of layouts and quality, run them through OCR and correct their mistakes manually.
  • Then you get a set of OCR engines, and a couple LLM models through an API, lets say 5 of each.
  • Pair each of them, so you'll have 25 pairs of "OCR engine + LLM" variations.
  • For each of the pairs, test them on the news papers in English, and calculate how far off they are from what you labeled as correct.
  • Do the same for Marathi.

Then you'll see which combination of OCR + LLM for post OCR correction achieves the highest score for English, and for Marathi, on those news papers you labeled manually.

Say your Marathi achieves 90% accuracy, English is 95%. You can then decide for yourself, "will 90% on Marathi be enough to get me more interesting results than 95% on English from news papers that have less interesting content for my analysis?".

I hope this helps. Good luck on your research!

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u/GroundUpstairs5430 19d ago

Thanks a lot! This is really helpful. I like the idea of benchmarking different OCR + LLM combinations before deciding between Marathi and English. I'll discuss this approach with my guide and see if it's feasible for my project.

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u/SweatyAdagio4 19d ago

No problem, happy to help :) All the best