legere 0.10.3

Compact CRNN OCR for printed text (Portuguese charset) — pure PyTorch, CPU-friendly, ~360k parameters

Legere

Compact CRNN OCR for printed text (Portuguese charset) — pure PyTorch, CPU-first, trained entirely on synthetic data.

Legere reads full document pages — images or PDFs — and returns text in reading order with per-line bounding boxes. It's built from scratch around a single small recognition network (CompactCRNN, ~360k parameters, hard-capped at 1M) paired with a classic, non-neural preprocessing pipeline: deskew, column detection and line segmentation all run on plain image projections, no learned layout model involved. A second tiny network (LineClassifier, ~8k parameters) filters out non-text ink — barcodes, QR blocks, stamps, rules — before it ever reaches the recognizer.

Nothing in the training data is real: every page, line, word, stain, camera blur and printer artifact is generated on the fly by a synthetic page generator, so there is no dataset to license, no PII to scrub and no copyright to worry about. The trained weights for both networks ship inside the package (about 1.4 MB total) — pip install legere gets you a working OCR engine with no downloads, no external services and no GPU requirement. Inference runs on PyTorch eager, TorchScript (FP32/INT8) or ONNX Runtime, whichever fits your deployment.

The project also ships the full machinery that produced those weights: the synthetic data generator (multiple page styles, dozens of degradations, ~90 fonts), a training loop with a live dashboard, EMA and curriculum support, export tooling for every backend, and a stage-by-stage profiler — so the model is not just usable but reproducible and extensible for anyone who wants to retrain it on their own document style.

• Installation
• Quickstart
• Architecture
  • Recognition model — CompactCRNN
  • Line filter model — LineClassifier
  • Character set
  • Inference pipeline
  • Inference backends
  • Synthetic data generator
  • Training system
  • File formats
• CLI reference
  • legere read
  • legere pdf
  • legere train
  • legere export
  • legere benchmark
  • legere detector
• Python API
• Metrics
• Project layout
• Development

---

Installation

pip install legere              # inference only (torch, numpy, opencv, pillow)
pip install legere[pdf]         # + PDF input (pypdfium2)
pip install legere[onnx]        # + ONNX Runtime backend
pip install legere[train]       # + training extras (rich, psutil)

Python ≥ 3.10. CPU is the primary target; CUDA is used for training when available. Training currently expects Windows (fonts are read from C:\Windows\Fonts); inference runs anywhere.

Quickstart

CLI:

legere document.pdf                     # OCR every page, text on stdout
legere read page.png --json out.json    # + per-line text and bboxes

Python:

from legere import Legere

ocr = Legere()                      # bundled weights, CPU
result = ocr.read("page.png")       # or a numpy array (grayscale or BGR)
print(result.text)                  # full text in reading order
for line in result.lines:
    print(line.text, line.bbox)     # (x0, y0, x1, y1) on the deskewed page

---

Architecture

image / PDF page
      │  pdf.py (pypdfium2 render, optional)
      ▼
fit to 1920×1080 ─▶ deskew ─▶ column detection ─▶ line segmentation
      (resize)   (projection   (vertical          (horizontal projection
                  variance)     whitespace         + rule removal,
                                gutters)           per column)
      ▼
LineClassifier filter ─▶ height-32 normalization ─▶ width-bucketed batches
 (text / non-text gate)                                    │
      ▼                                                    ▼
text in reading order ◀─ CTC decode ◀─ CompactCRNN (CNN + BiGRU + linear)

Recognition model — CompactCRNN

legere/model.py · 359,866 parameters (hard limit of 1,000,000 enforced at construction). Input: grayscale line crops (B, 1, 32, W) normalized to [-1, 1], W variable. Output: logits (B, W/4, 105).

Stage	Layer	Output shape (H×W×C)
Stem	Conv3×3 s2 + BN + ReLU	16 × W/2 × 24
Block 1	DWConv3×3 s(2,2) + PWConv1×1	8 × W/4 × 48
Block 2	DWConv3×3 s(1,1) + PWConv1×1	8 × W/4 × 64
Block 3	DWConv3×3 s(2,1) + PWConv1×1	4 × W/4 × 96
Block 4	DWConv3×3 s(1,1) + PWConv1×1	4 × W/4 × 128
Block 5	DWConv3×3 s(2,1) + PWConv1×1	2 × W/4 × 160
Block 6	DWConv3×3 s(2,1) + PWConv1×1	1 × W/4 × 192
Sequence	squeeze H → BiGRU(hidden 128, 1 layer)	W/4 × 256
Head	Linear 256 → 105	W/4 × 105

Every depthwise-separable block is DWConv + BN + ReLU + PWConv + BN + ReLU. Height is fully collapsed 32 → 1; width is downsampled ×4, so the CTC gets one timestep per 4 input pixels. Decoding: greedy best-path (default) or prefix beam search (pure Python, beam_width ≥ 1, per-frame log-prob pruning at −9.0).

Line filter model — LineClassifier

legere/model.py · ~8k parameters. A binary text/non-text classifier over the same normalized crops: stem Conv3×3 s2 (16ch) → 3 depthwise-separable blocks (16→32→48→64, all stride 2×2) → global average pool → Linear(64→1). It rejects non-text segments (barcodes, QR blocks, rules, doodles, stamps) before recognition. Bundled at legere/data/lineclf.pt; decision threshold 0.1 (deliberately conservative: keeps ≈98.5% of real text while rejecting ≈75% of distractors). Retrain with legere detector.

Character set

legere/charset.py · 104 characters + CTC blank (index 0) = 105 classes:

a-z  A-Z  0-9  áàâãçéêíóôõúü  ÁÀÂÃÇÉÊÍÓÔÕÚÜ
espaço . , ; : ! ? ' " ( ) [ ] { } % $ # @ & * + - = / \ _ < > | ° º ª

encode_text / decode_indices map text ↔ class indices; sanitize_text drops anything outside the charset (used by the data generator so ground truth is always encodable).

Inference pipeline

legere/inference.py + legere/segment.py. All classic stages operate on the grayscale page; no neural network is involved until recognition.

1. Fit to Full HD — pages larger than 1920×1080 are downscaled (INTER_AREA), aspect preserved. Smaller pages pass through.
2. Deskew — searches the rotation angle (±4°, coarse 0.5° then fine 0.1° steps) that maximizes the variance of the horizontal ink-projection profile, computed on a ≤800px-wide binarized copy. Rotation is applied only when |angle| ≥ 0.05°.
3. Column detection — on the binarized, rule-free page, a gutter is a run of near-empty pixel columns (≤0.2% of height inked) at least max(28 px, 2.5% of width) wide, strictly inside the inked region. Text crossing the middle (centered titles, section bars) breaks the run, so single-column forms are never split. Each region must hold ≥8% of the page ink; otherwise the page stays single-column. Reading order: left-to-right columns, top-to-bottom lines.
4. Line segmentation (per column) — adaptive Gaussian threshold (block 31, C 15, ink=white); long horizontal/vertical rules (table borders, underlines) removed by morphological opening (kernels max(25, dim/20)) and painted out of the grayscale crop source; rows with ≥2 ink pixels form bands; bands separated by ≤2 px merge (accents); bands <6 px tall are dropped; x-extent refined by the band's vertical projection; 3 px margin around each crop.
5. Line filter — LineClassifier scores every candidate crop; segments below threshold are dropped (--no-line-filter disables).
6. Normalization & batching — crops resized to height 32 (width capped at 1280 px ≈ 320 timesteps), padded with white to the batch max width (multiple of 4), scaled to [-1, 1]. Batches are width-bucketed under a budget of 48×384 padded pixels (≤64 lines per batch) so tensor size stays bounded.
7. Recognition & decode — CRNN forward under torch.inference_mode(), CTC greedy (or beam) decode. With min_confidence > 0, lines whose mean per-frame max-softmax falls below the threshold are dropped (second, recognizer-side distractor gate).

Inference backends

load_model(path, torchscript=...) resolves the backend:

Backend	How	Notes
PyTorch eager FP32	default; path=None uses bundled weights	reference implementation
TorchScript FP32	--torchscript + exports/model_fp32.ts.pt	scripted + frozen
TorchScript INT8	--torchscript + exports/model_int8.ts.pt	dynamic quantization of GRU + Linear
ONNX Runtime	any *.onnx path (auto-detected)	dynamic batch/width axes, opset 17; typically the fastest CPU backend

Synthetic data generator

legere/training/pagegen.py. Infinite, deterministic-per-seed page stream; every rendered line returns its exact text + ink bbox, so training crops are extracted directly (no annotation, no leakage of real data).

Page styles (style= / --style): document (headers, paragraphs, key/value lines, tables, optionally two-column), report (bordered label/value form grids with gray/inverted section bars, measurement values, gray bold footer — modeled after real technical reports), mixed (50/50 per page).

Content: ~65% real Portuguese words, ~35% syllable-built pseudo-words (prevents the BiGRU from memorizing a lexicon), plus structured formats: dates, money (R$), CPF/CNPJ, coordinates, percentages, measurements (NN.NN mm, N.NN º), serials, dotted UIDs, timestamps, phone/CEP/email. ~18% of sentences are punctuation-dense (08:45:12, 1.234,56, a, b; c: d.) to teach the .,;: distinctions.

Photometric degradations (page-level, scaled by severity ∈ [0,1] — ink never moves, so GT bboxes stay exact): paper texture + fiber grain, irregular illumination (linear gradient + radial vignette), bleed-through (blurred mirrored page ghost), stains and coffee rings, printer toner banding / low-toner fade / toner dropout speckle, scanner streaks, Gaussian noise, blur, contrast/brightness jitter, JPEG artifacts, and a phone-photo preset combining the harsh variants.

Geometric augmentations (line-crop level, training only): rotation ±3°, perspective quad jitter, vertical sine warp, SpecAugment-style occlusion bars.

Structural variety: inverted text (light on dark bars), underline / strikethrough / highlight decorations, variable letter tracking (0.88–1.30×), two-column layouts, barcode/QR distractors (no GT), and overlapping stamps / signature squiggles / scribbles. ~90 Windows fonts.

Training system

legere/training/train.py · legere/training/dataset.py.

• Loss: CTC (blank=0, zero_infinity); grad-norm clip 5.0.
• Optimizer: AdamW — weight decay 0.01 on ≥2-D params only; peak LR 2e-3 (from scratch) or 5e-4 (--finetune); linear warmup (500 steps) then cosine decay to a 2% floor.
• Batching: width-bucketed under --width-budget (default 24×384 = 9216 padded px per batch; max batch max(64, budget/144) lines); a 384-sample buffer is sorted by width and re-chunked so padding waste stays low.
• EMA (default on): a shadow copy of the model is updated every step (ema = 0.999·ema + 0.001·raw; BN buffers copied); validation and the shipped checkpoint use the EMA weights, the raw weights are kept under train_model for --resume.
• Curriculum (--curriculum): severity 0.4 → 0.7 → 1.0 at 0%/15%/35% of --max-steps (the data stream is rebuilt at each phase change).
• Workers (--workers N): page generation moves to N DataLoader processes (per-worker seed offsets keep streams disjoint), overlapping data creation with forward/backward.
• Validation: fixed line sets at severity 0.3 — with --style mixed, 1000 document lines (seed 1234) + 1000 report lines (seed 1235). Reports CER (overall + per style), WER and punctuation CER every --eval-every steps; metrics append to runs/metrics.jsonl.
• Stopping: hard stop at --max-steps; early stop once CER < --target-cer holds for --patience-after-target steps without improvement, or on a --plateau-steps plateau. Ctrl+C saves last.pt.
• Dashboard: Rich live UI — run mode, loss/CER sparklines, per-style and punctuation CER, throughput, eval history, sample predictions with match coloring, RAM/CPU gauges. --no-dashboard logs plain lines.

File formats

Training checkpoint (checkpoints/best.pt, last.pt): dict with model (shipped/EMA state dict), train_model (raw weights, EMA runs only), optimizer, scheduler, step, cer, best_cer, best_step, charset, parameters, style.

Bundled weights (legere/data/model.pt): model (state dict), charset, step, cer — loadable with weights_only=True. Refresh via legere export --bundle.

Line filter (legere/data/lineclf.pt): model (state dict), accuracy.

Metrics log (runs/metrics.jsonl, one JSON per eval): step, loss_ema, lr, cer, wer, punct_cer, cer_document, cer_report, best_cer, samples_per_sec, ram_mb, elapsed_sec.

---

CLI reference

The entry point is legere (also python -m legere). legere --version prints the version. legere <file> is a shortcut for legere read <file>.

legere read

OCR a page image or PDF; text on stdout, stats on stderr.

legere read INPUT [options]

Flag	Default	Description
INPUT	—	Image (any size) or PDF path
--model PATH	bundled	Checkpoint .pt, TorchScript export, or .onnx (auto-detects ONNX Runtime)
--torchscript	off	Load --model with torch.jit.load (TorchScript/INT8 exports)
--json PATH	—	Also write per-line {text, bbox[, page]} JSON
--beam N	0	CTC beam width (0 = greedy, fastest)
--threads N	4	torch.set_num_threads
--dpi N	200	PDF rendering resolution
--no-line-filter	off	Disable the learned non-text segment rejector
--min-confidence F	0.0	Drop lines below this mean CTC confidence (try 0.5 on noisy scans)

Multi-page PDFs print --- page N --- separators and add a page field to the JSON entries.

legere pdf

Convert PDF pages to PNG files (no OCR). Requires legere[pdf].

legere pdf INPUT.pdf [--out-dir DIR] [--dpi N]

Flag	Default	Description
--out-dir DIR	alongside the PDF	Output directory (<stem>_page001.png, ...)
--dpi N	200	Rendering resolution

legere train

Train the CompactCRNN on the synthetic stream. Requires legere[train].

legere train [options]        # defaults, live dashboard
legere train --setup          # interactive setup (prompts every option)

Flag	Default	Description
--setup	off	Interactive wizard (needs a terminal); any value entered overrides the flags below
--style {document,report,mixed}	mixed	Synthetic page style for training and validation
--finetune CKPT	—	Start a NEW run from existing weights only (fresh optimizer/schedule/step/best-CER); accepts a .pt path or bundled
--resume PATH	—	Continue an interrupted run (restores weights, optimizer, schedule, step, best CER); mutually exclusive with --finetune
--max-steps N	30000	Hard step limit
--lr F	auto	Peak LR (2e-3 scratch / 5e-4 finetune)
--weight-decay F	0.01	AdamW weight decay (matrix params only)
--warmup-steps N	500	Linear LR warmup
--width-budget N	9216	Sum of padded widths per batch — the batch-size knob
--accum N	1	Gradient accumulation steps
--workers N	0	Background data-generation processes (0 = in-process)
--threads N	physical cores	Torch CPU threads
--ram-limit MB	1024	RAM gauge limit shown in the dashboard (display only)
--curriculum	off	Ramp severity 0.4 → 0.7 → 1.0 across the run
--no-ema	off	Disable EMA weight averaging
--ema-decay F	0.999	EMA decay per step
--eval-every N	500	Validation interval (also checkpoints)
--val-size N	2000	Validation lines (split per style when mixed)
--val-seed N	1234	Validation generator seed
--seed N	42	Training stream / torch seed
--target-cer F	0.01	Early-stop target
--patience-after-target N	2500	Extra steps without improvement once target met
--plateau-steps N	8000	Stop after this many steps without CER improvement
--checkpoint-dir DIR	checkpoints	Where best.pt / last.pt go (relative to the CWD)
--metrics-file PATH	runs/metrics.jsonl	JSONL metrics log
--profile	off	Print per-phase step timings (data/forward/CTC/backward/optimizer) at the end
--no-dashboard	off	Plain log lines instead of the Rich dashboard

legere export

Convert a training checkpoint into deployment formats.

legere export [--checkpoint PATH] [--out-dir DIR] [--onnx] [--bundle OUT]

Flag	Default	Description
--checkpoint PATH	checkpoints/best.pt	Source checkpoint (or a weights-only .pt)
--out-dir DIR	exports	Writes model_fp32.ts.pt (scripted+frozen) and model_int8.ts.pt (dynamic INT8 of GRU+Linear)
--onnx	off	Also write model.onnx (opset 17, dynamic batch/width; parity-checked vs eager when onnxruntime is installed)
--bundle OUT_PT	—	Instead of exports, write a weights-only .pt (state dict + charset + metadata) — use --bundle src/legere/data/model.pt to refresh the packaged weights

legere benchmark

Two modes. Synthetic benchmark (no input file): line/page latency and full-page CER for every available backend. Profile mode (input file): stage-by-stage performance report for a real image/PDF.

legere benchmark [options]                 # synthetic, all backends
legere benchmark INPUT [--json out.json]   # profile a real file

Flag	Default	Description
INPUT	—	Image or PDF to profile (enables profile mode)
--profile	off	Force profile mode (implied by INPUT)
--json PATH	—	Write the profile report as JSON (stable schema_version)
--checkpoint PATH	bundled	Model for eager / profile mode (.pt or .onnx)
--torchscript	off	Load --checkpoint with torch.jit (profile mode)
--beam N	0	CTC beam width (profile mode)
--dpi N	200	PDF rendering resolution (profile mode)
--fp32-ts PATH	exports/model_fp32.ts.pt	TorchScript FP32 variant (skipped if missing)
--int8-ts PATH	exports/model_int8.ts.pt	TorchScript INT8 variant (skipped if missing)
--onnx PATH	exports/model.onnx	ONNX variant (skipped if missing)
--pages N	5	Synthetic Full-HD pages for the page benchmark
--line-runs N	30	Timed runs for single-line latency
--threads N	4	Torch CPU threads
--style {document,report,mixed}	document	Page style for the synthetic page benchmark

The profile report covers: system/CPU/backend, model load time and size, per-stage pipeline times (PDF render, resize, deskew, segmentation, normalization, tensor prep, CRNN forward, decode), per-line width and CRNN latency stats (avg/median/P95/max), per-batch padding waste, and lines/s + chars/s throughput. legere train --profile produces the training-side equivalent.

legere detector

Train the LineClassifier (text/non-text gate). Positives: GT line crops from both page styles at random severities (including inverted text). Negatives: synthetic barcodes/QR/rules/squiggles/blank paper + random non-text page regions.

legere detector [--steps N] [--out PATH]

Flag	Default	Description
--steps N	600	Training steps (BCE loss, Adam)
--batch-size N	32	Crops per step
--lr F	1e-3	Learning rate
--seed N	7	Data/torch seed
--out PATH	lineclf.pt	Output; use src/legere/data/lineclf.pt to refresh the bundled filter

---

Python API

from legere import (
    Legere,            # engine
    PageResult,        # .lines, .skew_angle, .text
    LineResult,        # .text, .bbox
    load_model,        # low-level model loader (all backends)
    run_page_ocr,      # low-level pipeline on a grayscale ndarray
    CompactCRNN, ModelConfig, CHARSET,
    LineSegment, preprocess_and_segment,
)
from legere.inference import load_line_filter, LineFilter, OnnxModel
from legere.metrics import (
    character_error_rate, word_error_rate,
    punctuation_error_rate, levenshtein,
)
from legere.pdf import render_pdf_pages, pdf_to_pngs, pdf_page_count

Legere(model=None, torchscript=False, beam_width=0, threads=None, line_filter=True, min_confidence=0.0) — loads once, reuse for many pages. model accepts a checkpoint path, a TorchScript export (with torchscript=True) or an .onnx path.

• .read(image) → PageResult — image is a path or numpy array (grayscale (H,W) or BGR (H,W,3)); PDFs are rejected with a pointer to:
• .read_pdf(path, dpi=200) → list[PageResult], one per page.

run_page_ocr(gray, model, beam_width=0, line_filter=None, min_confidence=0.0) → (texts, segments, skew_angle) — the low-level pipeline for custom flows.

load_line_filter(path=None, threshold=0.1) → LineFilter | None — the bundled text/non-text gate; keep_mask(crops) returns booleans.

Metrics

character_error_rate and word_error_rate are edit-distance rates over characters/words. punctuation_error_rate(preds, refs, marks=".,;:") filters both strings down to the tracked marks before the edit distance, so ,↔. and ;↔: confusions register even when everything else is right.

Project layout

src/legere/
├── __init__.py        # public API + __version__
├── charset.py         # charset, encode/decode, sanitize
├── model.py           # CompactCRNN, LineClassifier, CTC decoders
├── segment.py         # deskew, column detection, line segmentation
├── lines.py           # crop normalization + tensor batching
├── inference.py       # Legere engine, backends, filters, pipeline
├── metrics.py         # CER / WER / punctuation CER / levenshtein
├── pdf.py             # PDF rendering (pypdfium2)
├── profiling.py       # Profiler + stage-by-stage inference profiler
├── cli.py             # `legere` command
├── data/
│   ├── model.pt       # bundled CRNN weights (state dict + charset)
│   └── lineclf.pt     # bundled line-filter weights
└── training/
    ├── pagegen.py     # synthetic page generator (styles, degradations)
    ├── dataset.py     # training stream, crop extraction, validation sets
    ├── train.py       # training loop, dashboard, EMA, curriculum
    ├── lineclf.py     # LineClassifier training (`legere detector`)
    ├── export.py      # TorchScript / INT8 / ONNX / bundle exports
    └── benchmark.py   # synthetic benchmark + real-file profiler entry

Development

pip install -e .[pdf,onnx,train] pytest
pytest tests/ -q

Tests cover: charset round-trip, model shapes and the 1M-parameter budget, bundled-weight loading, blank/sample page reads, GT validity of augmented pages, punctuation metric, PDF rendering/conversion/reading, profiler sections and report, and ONNX↔eager output parity.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.