---
license: apache-2.0
tags:
  - image-classification
  - document-classification
  - timm
  - efficientnet
library_name: timm
pipeline_tag: image-classification
---

# LipiOCR Document Classifier

A lightweight document-type classifier — the classification stage of
**LipiOCR**, a fast document intelligence pipeline (classify → OCR →
QR/barcode decode → normalize) built as a speed-focused complement to
[ZuraAI-VL](https://ollama.com/bsspl/zuraai-vl-v3), a larger VLM used for
full structured extraction.

This model does one job well: given a photographed or scanned document,
tell you what type of document it is, in milliseconds, on CPU or GPU.
It does not read text — pair it with an OCR stage (LipiOCR uses
[glm-ocr](https://ollama.com/bsspl/glm-ocr)) for full extraction.

## Model details

- **Architecture:** EfficientNet-B0 (via `timm`), ImageNet-pretrained, fine-tuned end-to-end
- **Input:** 224×224 RGB image
- **Output:** 1 of 42 document type labels
- **Parameters:** ~5.3M

## Categories (42)

Identity: `aadhaar_card`, `cid`, `driving_license`, `nic`, `pan_card`, `passport`, `visa`, `voter_id`
Financial: `bank_cheque`, `bank_statement`, `invoice`, `pos_payment_slip`, `purchase_order`, `quotation`, `receipt`, `telegraphic_transfer`, `payment_voucher`, `credit_card`
Travel: `airway_bill`, `boarding_pass`, `courier_waybill`
Certificates: `birth_certificate`, `certificate`, `marriage_certificate`, `medical_certificate`, `vaccination_certificate`
Business/other: `business_card`, `employment_offer_letter`, `general_letter`, `income_tax_return`, `insurance_policy`, `marksheet`, `medical_prescription`, `menu_card`, `noc`, `product_catalog`, `reference_letter`, `rental_agreement`, `resume`, `salary_slip`, `utility_bill`, `vehicle_registration`

## Training data

- 7,227 training images across 42 categories, mostly synthetic (Faker-generated documents rendered with realistic layouts, colors, and — for the financial categories — real decodable QR/barcodes)
- A small set of real (non-synthetic) photographed/scanned documents, oversampled 15x during training to avoid being drowned out by the synthetic majority
- Training augmentation includes perspective warp, paper texture, directional lighting gradients, JPEG artifacts, and axis-aligned rotation — added specifically because a first version trained only on clean synthetic renders scored **0/11 on real photographed documents** despite 98%+ synthetic validation accuracy. These fixes brought real-document accuracy to roughly 90%+ on most categories (see Limitations).

## Performance

- **99.66%** validation accuracy on a held-out synthetic split (1,167 examples)
- **11/12** real photographed documents correctly classified in a spot validation across categories with real examples available

## Usage

```python
import json
import torch
import timm
from PIL import Image
from torchvision import transforms
from safetensors.torch import load_file

config = json.load(open("config.json"))
model = timm.create_model(config["architecture"], pretrained=False, num_classes=config["num_classes"])
model.load_state_dict(load_file("model.safetensors"))
model.eval()

preprocess = transforms.Compose([
    transforms.Resize((224, 224)),
    transforms.ToTensor(),
    transforms.Normalize(config["normalize_mean"], config["normalize_std"]),
])

img = Image.open("document.jpg").convert("RGB")
# Recommended: run CLAHE contrast normalization + deskew on `img` before
# this step for best real-world accuracy - see preprocess.py in the
# LipiOCR repo. A plain resize works but skips that robustness step.
x = preprocess(img).unsqueeze(0)

with torch.no_grad():
    probs = torch.softmax(model(x), dim=1)[0]
top = torch.argmax(probs).item()
print(config["labels"][top], probs[top].item())
```

## Limitations

- **Marksheet vs. resume confusion**: both render as structured line-item
  lists (subjects/grades vs. job history/skills), and this remains the
  weakest confusion pair in testing.
- **Real-world academic transcripts** (marksheets specifically) are the
  hardest category — real institutions' transcript layouts vary far more
  than any other document type, and the training set has limited real
  examples for this category specifically (~40% real-world accuracy vs.
  ~90%+ for most other categories).
- Trained primarily on English-language, Latin-script documents.
- No language identification or OCR capability — classification only.

## Part of LipiOCR

This model is one stage of a larger pipeline. The full system (OCR
extraction, QR/barcode decoding, digit-swap correction, and field
normalization) lives in the LipiOCR project alongside this classifier.