# Chronicles-OCR Benchmark A multi-task benchmark for vision-language models on **Chinese historical script OCR**, covering all seven canonical scripts of Chinese characters: Oracle Bone (甲骨文), Bronze Script (金文), Seal Script (篆书), Clerical Script (隶书), Regular Script (楷书), Running Script (行书), Cursive Script (草书). | Group | Scripts | Tasks | | ------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------- | | Ancient | Oracle Bone / Bronze Script / Seal Script | Spotting · Recognition · Parsing · Classification | | Modern | Clerical Script / Regular Script / Running Script / Cursive Script | Parsing · Classification | The four tasks: | Task | Short Name | Metric | Description | | ------------------------------------------ | -------------- | --------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Cross-period Character Spotting | Spotting | F1 @ IoU > 0.75 | Detect bounding boxes and identify the modern character for each box | | Fine-grained Archaic Character Recognition | Recognition | Exact-match Accuracy | Identify the modern character inside a red bounding box drawn on the image | | Ancient Text Parsing | Parsing | 1 − NED (Levenshtein) | Read all characters in reading order; `[UNK]` is filtered before scoring | | Script Classification | Classification | Accuracy | Classify the image into one of the seven canonical scripts | All scoring is **rule-based** — no LLM judge is needed. > Note: the Spotting task internally also reports a Detection F1 (bbox-only, IoU > 0.75 without character matching) as a diagnostic; the headline Spotting score requires both IoU and character match. --- ## 1. Setup ```bash git clone cd ChronoText/Opensource pip install -r requirements.txt # Optional: only if you plan to use --api_type local_vllm pip install vllm ``` ## 2. Download benchmark data The dataset (jsonl + images) is released as a single archive. Place the files under `Opensource/data/`: ``` Opensource/data/ ├── Chronicles_OCR.jsonl └── images/ ├── 甲骨文/... # Oracle Bone ├── 金文/... # Bronze Script ├── 篆书/... # Seal Script ├── 隶书/... # Clerical Script ├── 楷书/... # Regular Script ├── 行书/... # Running Script └── 草书/... # Cursive Script ``` Each line of the jsonl looks like: ```json { "image_path": "images/甲骨文/abcdef0123.jpg", "font_type": "甲骨文", "annotation": "...", "spotting": [{"bbox": {"x1":..,"y1":..,"x2":..,"y2":..}, "modern_char": ".."}, ...], "width": 800, "height": 600 } ``` `spotting` / `width` / `height` only exist for the three ancient scripts; modern scripts only carry `image_path`, `font_type`, and `annotation`. ## 3. Inference Three backends are supported via `--api_type`: ### (a) `openai_compat` — any OpenAI-compatible HTTP service Works with locally-served models (`vllm serve`, `sglang`, `lmdeploy`) **or** public APIs that speak the OpenAI Chat Completions protocol (OpenAI, Gemini OpenAI-compat, Claude OpenAI-compat, Together, …). ```bash python infer.py \ --api_type openai_compat \ --model_name Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct \ --base_url http://127.0.0.1:8000/v1 \ --api_key EMPTY \ --max_workers 64 ``` ### (b) `local_vllm` — in-process vLLM, give it a model path No need to start a server first. The script loads the checkpoint directly with `vllm.LLM`. ```bash python infer.py \ --api_type local_vllm \ --model_path /path/to/Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct \ --tensor_parallel_size 1 \ --max_model_len 32768 ``` ### Output Each run writes one jsonl file: ``` Opensource/infer_results//results.jsonl ``` `` defaults to `--model_name` / basename of `--model_path` / `--api_name`. You can override it with `--output_tag`. ## 4. Judging ```bash # All models under infer_results/ python judge.py # Specific models python judge.py --models Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct gemini-3.1-pro ``` Outputs to `Opensource/judge_results//results.jsonl`. The judge step is purely rule-based and **always overwrites** previous output (it is very fast). ## 5. Summary report ```bash python summarize.py # → Opensource/judge_results/results_analysis.xlsx ``` The workbook has two sheets, displayed in the canonical task order **Spotting · Recognition · Parsing · Classification**: - **Per-group summary** — per-model averages aggregated by Ancient / Modern groups - **Per-script breakdown** — per-model averages broken down by each of the seven scripts Scores are scaled `×100` and shown to 1 decimal (e.g. `87.3` means 0.873). --- ## 6. End-to-end example ```bash # 1. Run inference python infer.py --api_type openai_compat \ --model_name Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct \ --base_url http://127.0.0.1:8000/v1 # 2. Score python judge.py # 3. Aggregate to Excel python summarize.py ``` --- ## 7. Repo layout ``` Opensource/ ├── README.md / README_zh.md ├── requirements.txt ├── data/ # ← download benchmark data here ├── apis/ │ ├── base.py # APIBase │ ├── openai_compat.py # OpenAI-compatible client │ ├── local_vllm.py # in-process vLLM ├── prompts/ │ ├── spotting.py # Cross-period Character Spotting │ ├── referring.py # Fine-grained Archaic Character Recognition (red-box rendering) │ ├── extract_text.py # Ancient Text Parsing │ └── classify.py # Script Classification ├── judges/ │ ├── spotting.py │ ├── referring.py │ ├── extract_text.py │ └── classify.py ├── utils/ │ ├── image_utils.py # base64 encoding for OpenAI-compat │ ├── io.py # ResultWriter / read_processed │ ├── signal_utils.py # Ctrl+C aware shutdown │ └── unk.py # [UNK] / □ / ■ etc. ├── infer.py # entry: inference ├── judge.py # entry: rule-based scoring └── summarize.py # entry: Excel report ```