Open-Capture vs Surya

Open-Capture collects documents, extracts information with OCR and AI, and exports results to third-party management software. It accepts material from scanners, copiers, file drops, email and attachments, web forms, uploads, and web services. Extraction options include Tesseract OCR, pre-trained models, machine-learning classification, key-value extraction, reference-data matching, dictionaries, and barcode or QR-code reading. Extracted fields can be checked against rules, formats, reference data, and scripted business rules. The full-web application runs natively on Linux and can be hosted on-premise or in a public or private cloud. It is free and open-source under the GNU GPLv3 license, with no limit on users. Optional modules include Splitter for preparing batches, Verifier for checking extracted data, and MailCollect for email processing. MailCollect analyzes messages, identifies senders, extracts metadata, and routes attachments into processing workflows. Verifier is described for structured or semi-structured documents such as invoices, delivery notes, contracts, and purchase orders. Listed connections include a native MEM Courrier connector, CMIS, OpenADS/Oxalis, OpenCRM, Alfresco, and SharePoint; export formats include PDF, PDF/A, XML, CSV, and plain text.

Surya is a 650M-parameter OCR model for extracting text and analyzing document structure. It handles layout, reading order and tables, and supports OCR in 91 languages. Surya 2 returns page content as structured blocks that can include HTML, polygons, bounding boxes, confidence values and reading order. Table recognition can provide row and column geometry; full mode can also return HTML with spanning cells and header rows. Equations found in page OCR are represented as KaTeX-compatible LaTeX within math tags. Users can work with a Python package, command-line tools or an interactive Streamlit app for images and PDFs. Layout, OCR and table recognition require an inference backend: vLLM on NVIDIA GPUs or llama.cpp on CPU and Apple Silicon, or a connection to an existing server. Surya is free and open source. The code uses Apache 2.0, while the model weights have a separate modified AI Pubs Open Rail-M license with commercial-use conditions. It is specialized for documents, not photos or natural scenes.