Project Title

donut — OCR-free Document Understanding Transformer for State-of-the-Art Visual Document Tasks

Overview

Donut is an OCR-free end-to-end Transformer model designed for document understanding tasks. It eliminates the need for off-the-shelf OCR engines/APIs while achieving state-of-the-art performance in visual document classification and information extraction. The project also includes SynthDoG, a synthetic document generator that enhances model pre-training flexibility across languages and domains.

Key Features

OCR-free end-to-end Transformer model for document understanding
SynthDoG, a synthetic document generator for flexible pre-training
State-of-the-art performance in visual document classification and information extraction
Gradio web demos for interactive model testing

Use Cases

Researchers and developers working on visual document understanding tasks
Enterprises needing to automate document classification and information extraction
Educational institutions for teaching and research in document AI

Advantages

Removes dependency on OCR engines for document understanding
Achieves state-of-the-art performance without OCR
Flexible pre-training with SynthDoG for various languages and domains
Provides interactive web demos for easy model testing

Limitations / Considerations

May require significant computational resources for training and inference
Performance may vary across different document types and languages
The project is relatively new, and long-term community support and updates are yet to be established

Tesseract OCR: A popular open-source OCR engine, but requires OCR for document understanding tasks.
LayoutLM: A model for document understanding that focuses on document layout analysis, often used in conjunction with OCR.
DocVQA: A visual question answering model for documents, which may require OCR for certain tasks.

Basic Information

GitHub: https://github.com/clovaai/donut
Stars: 6,664
License: Unknown
Last Commit: 2025-11-17

📊 Project Information

Project Name: donut
GitHub URL: https://github.com/clovaai/donut
Programming Language: Python
⭐ Stars: 6,664
🍴 Forks: 544
📅 Created: 2022-07-20
🔄 Last Updated: 2025-11-17

🏷️ Project Topics

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