modbender jpocr — Japanese OCR Skill
Local Japanese OCR powered by NDLOCR-Lite from Japan's National Diet Library. Runs on CPU (Apple Silicon / x86), no GPU or API key required.
Capabilities
| Target | Quality |
|---|---|
| Printed Japanese (活字) | Excellent |
| Vertical text (縦書き) | Excellent |
| English text | Good |
| Handwritten Japanese (手書き) | Experimental |
How to call
Run scripts/ocr-cli.sh from the skill root directory:
<SKILL_ROOT>/scripts/ocr-cli.sh <image_path> # → plain text to stdout
<SKILL_ROOT>/scripts/ocr-cli.sh <image_path> --json # → JSON with bounding boxes
<SKILL_ROOT>/scripts/ocr-cli.sh <image_path> --viz # → also saves visualization
<SKILL_ROOT>/scripts/ocr-cli.sh <dir_path> # → batch all images in dir
Output formats
text (default): one line per detected text region.
json:
{
"contents": [[
{
"boundingBox": [[x1,y1],[x1,y2],[x2,y1],[x2,y2]],
"text": "recognized text",
"confidence": 0.95,
"isVertical": "true"
}
]],
"imginfo": { "img_width": 1920, "img_height": 1080 }
}
viz: saves viz_<filename> bounding-box overlay image to the output directory.
Performance
- ~2-3 seconds per image on Apple Silicon (CPU)
- Formats: JPG, PNG, TIFF, JP2, BMP
- Charset: ~7000 characters (JIS kanji + kana + ASCII + Greek)
Tech stack
- Layout detection: DEIMv2 (ONNX)
- Text recognition: PARSeq cascade (30/50/100 char models, ONNX)
- Reading order: xy-cut algorithm