Have you tried using pytesseract? It’s a Python wrapper for Google’s Tesseract-OCR Engine and works quite well for many standard OCR use cases. It’s especially useful if you’re starting out or just need to extract text from images with decent accuracy.
If you’re working with Hugging Face models, you might also want to explore projects that use Transformers in combination with layout-aware models like LayoutLM or Donut (Document Understanding Transformer). These models go beyond just text extraction they can understand structure, layout, and even perform tasks like form parsing or document classification.
But if your goal is primarily OCR, and you’re not dealing with complex layouts, pytesseract is lightweight and easy to integrate. You can even use it alongside image preprocessing techniques (like OpenCV for noise removal or binarization) to boost accuracy.