LiteRT is Google's on-device runtime, the new name for TensorFlow Lite (Android: com.google.ai.edge.litert:litert), and litert-torch, the renamed ai-edge-torch, is its PyTorch converter: a PyTorch model converted unmodified with litert_torch.convert matched the original to 4e-7 on a Galaxy S26 (measured, LiteRT 2.2.0, Android 16, 2026-09-05).
PP-OCRv5 — LiteRT on-device (fully GPU)
PP-OCRv5 on-device OCR on a Pixel 8a
On-device LiteRT conversion of PP-OCRv5
(PaddleOCR 2025, Apache-2.0) text detection + recognition, running fully on the CompiledModel GPU
delegate (LITERT_CL). Detects text regions in an image and reads each line. The recognizer uses a CTC
head (no autoregressive decoder), so both stages ride the GPU with no CPU/ONNX fallback — unlike
VLM-based OCR (Florence-2 / GOT-OCR) whose AR decoder must run on CPU. Device-verified on a Pixel 8a.
Pixel 8a: detector 777/777 + recognizer 827/827 on LITERT_CL, ~9 ms each; a 3-line image read 3/3
correct ("Hello OCR 2026" / "PP-OCRv5 on GPU" / "LiteRT CompiledModel").
ppocr_rec_fp32.tflite is the recognizer before the fp16 cast, added for the browser. In
LiteRT.js 2.5.3, wasm XNNPACK declines the fp16 recognizer graph (reference-kernel fallback,
~430 ms/line) but fully delegates the fp32 one: ~21 ms/line on an M4 Max. The WebGPU delegate
flips some recognizer argmaxes on this architecture regardless of weight precision, so in the
browser run the detector on WebGPU and the recognizer on wasm with the fp32 file.
Preprocessing: detector = ImageNet mean/std, /255, NCHW, 640×640. recognizer = resize to h=48 keep-aspect,
pad to width 320, (img/255−0.5)/0.5.
Sample app
A complete Android sample app + the conversion scripts are in the official LiteRT samples repository under
compiled_model_api/ocr (google-ai-edge/litert-samples). Push these files to the app's filesDir
with that sample's install_to_device.sh.
Weights are converted from PaddleOCR via the PaddleOCR2Pytorch
port (Apache-2.0). License follows upstream PaddleOCR (Apache-2.0).
Performance
Measured on a Pixel 8a (Tensor G3, Android 16) with the standard TFLite benchmark_model tool — 10 warm-up runs then 50 timed runs, reported as the tool's mean.
Any on-device figure recorded when this model shipped came from a different runtime. It was taken through LiteRT's own CompiledModel accelerator (logcat reports it as LITERT_CL), which is the path the Kotlin sample app and the LiteRT API use, and it appears elsewhere on this card. The rows above are the classic TFLite OpenCL delegate, measured with a tool anyone can download and re-run. The two are not comparable, so read the rows above as a reproducible floor rather than as this model's speed on LiteRT.
XNNPACK declines these fp16 graphs — it reports failed to delegate DEPTHWISE_CONV_2D and then fails to allocate tensors — so there is no usable CPU number. Disabling XNNPACK falls back to reference kernels, which measured about 20× slower than the GPU on models of this size and would not represent CPU inference anyone would ship.
Note that the GPU does not take the whole graph here (579 / 827 in ppocr_rec_fp16.tflite); the remainder runs on the CPU and the split costs a per-partition round trip.
Snapdragon NPU (Hexagon)
ppocr_det_fp16.tflite — the NPU is 2.04x faster than the GPU (8.63 ms against 17.59 ms) and loads 9.19x faster (139 ms against 1278 ms).
ppocr_rec_fp16.tflite — the NPU is 1.35x faster than the GPU (5.91 ms against 8.00 ms) and loads 10.70x faster (120 ms against 1280 ms).
ppocr_rec_fp32.tflite — the NPU is 1.26x faster than the GPU (6.33 ms against 7.98 ms) and loads 15.52x faster (129 ms against 2007 ms).
file
backend
compiled
inference (median / min)
load
ppocr_det_fp16.tflite
NPU (Hexagon v81)
on-device JIT
8.63 ms / 8.53 ms
139 ms
ppocr_det_fp16.tflite
GPU (Adreno)
—
17.59 ms / 16.73 ms
1278 ms
ppocr_rec_fp16.tflite
NPU (Hexagon v81)
on-device JIT
5.91 ms / 5.80 ms
120 ms
ppocr_rec_fp16.tflite
GPU (Adreno)
—
8.00 ms / 7.75 ms
1280 ms
ppocr_rec_fp32.tflite
NPU (Hexagon v81)
on-device JIT
6.33 ms / 6.17 ms
129 ms
ppocr_rec_fp32.tflite
GPU (Adreno)
—
7.98 ms / 6.27 ms
2007 ms
Measured on a Samsung Galaxy S26 (Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 / SM8850, Hexagon v81, Android 16) with LiteRT CompiledModel 2.2.0, one accelerator per process, 5 warm-up runs then N=50 timed runs, median reported. Every run held thermal status NONE throughout. Headroom 0.77–0.81, where 1.0 is the throttling threshold.
The NPU rows ran the published file unchanged. LiteRT compiled it for the Hexagon on the device at first load. Those first compiles took 4.0 s to 28 s here. The load column above is the cached load every later run pays. Recipe and the runtime libraries it needs: NPU guide.
Measured on a Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.1 (8 GB, Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit) with the LiteRT benchmark_model tool from litert-cli-nightly 0.2.0.dev20260805: CPU inference (XNNPACK, 4 threads), 3 invocations per file of 10 warm-up plus 50 timed runs (the tool caps a phase at 150 s, so very slow graphs run fewer — the Runs column is the actual timed total). The latency is the median across invocations; the spread is the min–max over all timed runs. No thermal throttling occurred during these runs (vcgencmd get_throttled stayed 0x0).