AI Engineering/Phase 04/Lesson 19

OCR & Document Understanding

OCR is a three-stage pipeline — detect text boxes, recognise the characters, then lay them out. Every modern OCR system reorders these stages or merges them.

Learn + Use 45 min Python

Prerequisites: Phase 4 Lesson 06 (Detection), Phase 7 Lesson 02 (Self-Attention)

#Learning Objectives

Trace the classical OCR pipeline (detect -> recognise -> layout) and the modern end-to-end alternatives (Donut, Qwen-VL-OCR)
Implement CTC (Connectionist Temporal Classification) loss for sequence-to-sequence OCR training
Use PaddleOCR or EasyOCR for production document parsing without training
Distinguish OCR, layout parsing, and document understanding — and pick the right tool per task

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The text and code of this lesson are based on AI Engineering from Scratch by Rohit Ghumare, MIT licensed.