The Surya code is licensed under Apache 2.0. The model weights use a modified AI Pubs Open Rail-M license (free for research, personal use, and startups under $5M funding/revenue). For broader commercial licensing of the model weights, visit our pricing page here.
Installation
Install with:
pip install surya-ocr
Usage
Surya 2 runs layout, OCR, and table recognition through a single VLM served
by vllm (GPU) or llama.cpp (CPU / Apple Silicon). The inference manager
will spawn one for you on first use; you can also point it at an existing
server via SURYA_INFERENCE_URL=http://host:port/v1.
Inspect the settings in surya/settings.py. You can override any setting via env var (e.g. SURYA_INFERENCE_BACKEND=vllm).
Text detection and OCR errors are separate models.
Interactive App
I've included a streamlit app that lets you interactively try Surya on images or PDF files. Run it with:
shell
1pip install streamlit pdftext
2surya_gui
OCR (text recognition)
This command will write out a json file with the detected text and bboxes:
surya_ocr DATA_PATH
DATA_PATH can be an image, pdf, or folder of images/pdfs
--images will save images of the pages and detected blocks (optional)
--output_dir specifies the directory to save results to instead of the default
--page_range specifies the page range to process in the PDF, specified as a single number, a comma separated list, a range, or comma separated ranges - example: 0,5-10,20.
The results.json file contains a dict keyed by input filename (no extension). Each value is a list of page dicts. Each page dict contains:
blocks - per-block OCR results in reading order
label - canonicalized layout label (e.g. Text, SectionHeader, Table, Equation, Picture, Form, PageHeader, ...). See surya/layout/label.py:LAYOUT_PRED_RELABEL for the full canonical-name set.
raw_label - original label emitted by the model, before canonicalization
reading_order - 0-indexed position in layout output
html - block content as HTML (math wrapped in <math>...</math>, tables as <table>...</table>, etc.). "" if the block was skipped
polygon - 4-corner polygon in [[x0,y0],[x1,y0],[x1,y1],[x0,y1]] order
bbox - axis-aligned [x0, y0, x1, y1] derived from the polygon
confidence - mean per-token probability across the block's decode (0-1)
skipped - true if the block was a visual label (e.g. Picture) and not OCR'd
error - true if the block OCR call failed
image_bbox - [0, 0, width, height] for the page image
Performance tips
Throughput is governed by the inference backend, not a RECOGNITION_BATCH_SIZE env var. With vllm, raise --max-num-seqs / --max-num-batched-tokens (or SURYA_INFERENCE_PARALLEL on the client side) to keep more pages in flight. With llama.cpp, set SURYA_INFERENCE_PARALLEL to match --parallel on llama-server.
This command will write out a json file with the detected bboxes.
surya_detect DATA_PATH
DATA_PATH can be an image, pdf, or folder of images/pdfs
--images will save images of the pages and detected text lines (optional)
--output_dir specifies the directory to save results to instead of the default
--page_range specifies the page range to process in the PDF, specified as a single number, a comma separated list, a range, or comma separated ranges - example: 0,5-10,20.
The results.json file will contain a json dictionary where the keys are the input filenames without extensions. Each value will be a list of dictionaries, one per page of the input document. Each page dictionary contains:
bboxes - detected bounding boxes for text
bbox - the axis-aligned rectangle for the text line in (x1, y1, x2, y2) format. (x1, y1) is the top left corner, and (x2, y2) is the bottom right corner.
polygon - the polygon for the text line in (x1, y1), (x2, y2), (x3, y3), (x4, y4) format. The points are in clockwise order from the top left.
confidence - the confidence of the model in the detected text (0-1)
vertical_lines - vertical lines detected in the document
bbox - the axis-aligned line coordinates.
page - the page number in the file
image_bbox - the bbox for the image in (x1, y1, x2, y2) format. (x1, y1) is the top left corner, and (x2, y2) is the bottom right corner. All line bboxes will be contained within this bbox.
Performance tips
Detection is a torch model. DETECTOR_BATCH_SIZE defaults to an auto-picked value at runtime; override the env var to control VRAM usage on GPU and raise it on larger cards.
This command will write out a json file with the detected layout and reading order.
surya_layout DATA_PATH
DATA_PATH can be an image, pdf, or folder of images/pdfs
--images will save images of the pages and detected text lines (optional)
--output_dir specifies the directory to save results to instead of the default
--page_range specifies the page range to process in the PDF, specified as a single number, a comma separated list, a range, or comma separated ranges - example: 0,5-10,20.
The results.json file contains a dict keyed by input filename (no extension). Each value is a list of page dicts. Each page dict contains:
This command will write out a json file with the detected table cells and row/column ids, along with row/column bounding boxes. If you want to get cell positions and text, along with nice formatting, check out the marker repo. You can use the TableConverter to detect and extract tables in images and PDFs. It supports output in json (with bboxes), markdown, and html.
surya_table DATA_PATH
DATA_PATH can be an image, pdf, or folder of images/pdfs
--images will save annotated row + column overlays alongside the json (optional)
--output_dir specifies the directory to save results to instead of the default
--page_range specifies the page range to process in the PDF, specified as a single number, a comma separated list, a range, or comma separated ranges - example: 0,5-10,20.
--skip_table_detection tells table recognition not to detect tables first. Use this if your image is already cropped to a table.
The results.json file contains a dict keyed by input filename (no extension). Each value is a list of per-table dicts. Each table dict contains:
html - full <table>...</table> HTML (only populated when predict_full is used; handles spanning cells / header rows). null in simple mode.
mode - "simple" or "full"
image_bbox - the table crop bbox
error - true if the table_rec call failed
raw - raw model output, for debugging
Performance tips
Table recognition routes through the shared VLM. Throughput tuning is the same as OCR.
From python
python
1from PIL import Image
2from surya.inference import SuryaInferenceManager
3from surya.table_rec import TableRecPredictor
45table_rec_predictor = TableRecPredictor(SuryaInferenceManager())67# Default: rows + columns only, cells derived from intersections.8table_predictions = table_rec_predictor([Image.open(IMAGE_PATH)])910# Or full HTML output (better for spanning cells / headers):11# table_predictions = table_rec_predictor.predict_full([image])
Math / equations
Surya 2 handles math inline as part of full-page OCR — recognized equations
come back inside <math>...</math> tags in the same HTML output as
surrounding prose, in KaTeX-compatible LaTeX. No separate LaTeX OCR pass.
Inference Backends
Layout / OCR / table_rec all share one VLM, served either by vllm (GPU) or llama.cpp (CPU / Apple Silicon). The SuryaInferenceManager will spawn one automatically; you can also point at a pre-running server:
bash
1# Attach to an existing vllm2exportSURYA_INFERENCE_BACKEND=vllm
3exportSURYA_INFERENCE_URL=http://localhost:8000/v1
Setting
Default
Notes
SURYA_INFERENCE_BACKEND
auto (vllm if NVIDIA, else llamacpp)
vllm | llamacpp | unset (auto)
SURYA_INFERENCE_URL
(auto-spawn)
Attach to a running OpenAI-compatible server
SURYA_INFERENCE_PARALLEL
8
Client-side concurrency to the backend
SURYA_GUIDED_LAYOUT
true
JSON-schema-constrained layout decode
Limitations
This is specialized for document OCR. Performance on photos or natural scenes is not the goal.
Layout / OCR / table_rec all need a running inference backend (vllm or llama.cpp). Detection runs purely on torch and works without it.
Troubleshooting
If OCR isn't working properly:
Try increasing resolution of the image so the text is bigger. If the resolution is already very high, try decreasing it to no more than a 2048px width.
Preprocessing the image (binarizing, deskewing, etc) can help with very old/blurry images.
You can adjust DETECTOR_BLANK_THRESHOLD and DETECTOR_TEXT_THRESHOLD if you don't get good results. DETECTOR_BLANK_THRESHOLD controls the space between lines - any prediction below this number will be considered blank space. DETECTOR_TEXT_THRESHOLD controls how text is joined - any number above this is considered text. DETECTOR_TEXT_THRESHOLD should always be higher than DETECTOR_BLANK_THRESHOLD, and both should be in the 0-1 range. Looking at the heatmap from the debug output of the detector can tell you how to adjust these (if you see faint things that look like boxes, lower the thresholds, and if you see bboxes being joined together, raise the thresholds).
Manual install
If you want to develop surya, you can install it manually with uv:
bash
1git clone https://github.com/datalab-to/surya.git
2cd surya
3uv sync --group dev # installs runtime + dev deps4uv run surya_ocr ... # or `uv shell` to enter the venv
Benchmarks
Surya 2 is a single VLM that handles layout analysis, OCR (full-page or
per-block), and table recognition in one model. We evaluate end-to-end on
olmOCR-bench — the
standard quality benchmark for document parsers.
olmOCR-bench
Pareto-optimal, and best in class under 3B params.
Model
Params
Score
Infinity-Parser2-Pro
35.1B
87.6
Chandra OCR 2 (Datalab)
5.3B
85.9
dots.mocr
3.0B
83.9
Surya OCR 2 (Datalab)
0.65B
83.3
LightOnOCR 2-1B *
1.0B
83.2
Chandra OCR 1 (Datalab)
9.0B
83.1
olmOCR (anchored)
8.3B
77.4
GOT OCR
0.6B
48.3
* LightOnOCR 2-1B uses a different benchmark methodology than the other entries (see their release notes); the score is included for context but is not directly comparable.
Surya 2, per-source pass rate on the default preset (8,413 tests total):
ArXiv
Base
Hdr/Ftr
TinyTxt
MultCol
OldScan
OldMath
Tables
88.3
99.7
92.5
93.7
82.4
41.8
81.4
86.6
Multilingual
We also evaluate Surya 2 against a 91-language internal benchmark covering
text accuracy, layout, tables, math, and reading order in documents drawn
from each language.
Overall pass rate: 87.2% across 91 languages. 38 of the
91 languages score ≥ 90%; 76 score ≥ 80%.
Full-page OCR, 96 DPI input (~2,400 output tokens/page average), measured
client-side against a running inference server.
RTX 5090 (vllm)
vllm/vllm-openai:v0.20.1, single RTX 5090 (32 GB).
Concurrency
Pages/s
Tokens/s
p50 (ms)
p95 (ms)
avg tok/page
128
5.35
12,884
18,915
42,538
2,410
Apple Silicon (llama.cpp / Metal)
llama-server with Metal backend.
--parallel
Pages/s
Tokens/s
p50 (ms)
p95 (ms)
avg tok/page
Power
8
0.108
254
59,313
129,173
2,360
~30 W
Reproducing
We score Surya 2 on olmOCR-bench by serving the model with vllm (or
llama.cpp) and running the olmOCR-bench harness from
allenai/olmocr, with some adjustments applied to account for our output HTML format.
Training
Layout, OCR, and table recognition all share a single vision-language model
(Qwen3.5-style architecture, ~650M params). It's trained on diverse document
images to emit either a layout JSON or a full-page HTML output, depending on
prompt. Text-line detection is a separate small torch model — a modified
EfficientViT segformer trained from scratch on document line annotations.
If you want help finetuning Surya on your own data, or to use our managed
training stack, reach us at hi@datalab.to.
Thanks
This work would not have been possible without amazing open source AI work: