CER no longer fits full-page OCR: layout and style decisions all count as errors

staghado · x · 2026-09-03

staghado argues CER made sense for line/word-level eval with CRNN+CTC models — fixed vocab, no formatting, no reading order, no layout, so there was no convention surface. Full-page OCR now forces models to make dozens of stylistic decisions where the ground truth picked one particular way ten years ago, and CER treats all of them as reading errors. He concedes CER is still fine for line/word-level benchmarks.

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