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OCR Engine Trade-off Analysis

Implementation: MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers providing orchestrated OCR processing.

Engine Comparison

Engine License Languages GPU Best For MCP Port
Tesseract Apache 2.0 100+ ❌ Standard documents, forms 8089
EasyOCR Apache 2.0 80+ ✅ Handwriting, scene text 8092
PaddleOCR Apache 2.0 Chinese + 80 ✅ Tables, Chinese text 8090
Surya GPL-3.0 90+ ✅ Layout analysis, reading order 8091
Docling MIT Multi ✅ Document structure, PDFs 8093
Chandra OCR Proprietary Indic ✅ Hindi, regional languages —
LlamaIndex MIT — ✅ RAG pipelines, indexing —

Trade-off Matrix

Criteria Tesseract EasyOCR PaddleOCR Surya Docling Chandra LlamaIndex
Accuracy (print) ⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ —
Accuracy (handwriting) ⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐ —
Hindi/Indic ⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ —
Table detection ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐ —
Speed (CPU) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐ ⭐⭐⭐ —
GPU acceleration ❌ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Document indexing ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ ❌ ✅

MCP Server Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    OCR Orchestrator                      │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  :8089        :8090        :8091       :8092     :8093  │
│ Tesseract   PaddleOCR     Surya     EasyOCR   Docling  │
│   MCP         MCP          MCP        MCP       MCP    │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
              │
              ▼
        LlamaIndex (RAG pipeline for indexed search)
Document Type Primary Engine Fallback Notes
Prescriptions (Hindi) Chandra OCR Surya Best Indic language support
Lab Reports (English) Tesseract EasyOCR Fast, reliable
Hospital Bills/Tables PaddleOCR Docling Table structure extraction
Pathology PDFs Docling Surya Document structure analysis
Handwritten notes EasyOCR Surya Scene text specialization
Post-OCR search/RAG LlamaIndex — Vector indexing layer