Model reference · open weights

trocr-small-stage1

LLMs microsoft Image→text 1 build Licence not stated 12k dl/mo

trocr-small-stage1 is an open-weight language model from microsoft. trocr-small-stage1 (BF16) weighs 246 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • trocr-small-stage1 is a pre-trained image-to-text model developed by Microsoft for optical character recognition on single text-line images.
  • It uses an encoder-decoder architecture where the image encoder is initialized from DeiT weights and the text decoder from UniLM weights.
  • The model processes images as a sequence of 16x16 fixed-size patches and generates text tokens autoregressively.

Summary of the microsoft/trocr-small-stage1 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bymicrosoft
Released2022-03-02
VRAM246 MB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for trocr-small-stage1 (BF16)

246 MBweights, file size
762 MBruntime overhead, at least

How much memory each request adds isn't estimated yet for this architecture. The weights need at least the cards below, plus room for the context.

CardWeights alone
RTX 3060 12 GBfits
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits
RTX 3090 24 GBfits
RTX 4090 24 GBfits
RTX 5090 32 GBfits
L40S 48 GBfits
A100 80 GBfits
H100 80 GBfits
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits
H200 141 GBfits
B200 180 GBfits

From the model card

What microsoft says about trocr-small-stage1

Read the model card

TrOCR pre-trained only model. It was introduced in the paper TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models by Li et al. and first released in this repository.

Model description

The TrOCR model is an encoder-decoder model, consisting of an image Transformer as encoder, and a text Transformer as decoder. The image encoder was initialized from the weights of DeiT, while the text decoder was initialized from the weights of UniLM.

Images are presented to the model as a sequence of fixed-size patches (resolution 16x16), which are linearly embedded. One also adds absolute position embeddings before feeding the sequence to the layers of the Transformer encoder. Next, the Transformer text decoder autoregressively generates tokens.

Intended uses & limitations

You can use the raw model for optical character recognition (OCR) on single text-line images. See the model hub to look for fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.

How to use

Here is how to use this model in PyTorch:

from transformers import TrOCRProcessor, VisionEncoderDecoderModel
from PIL import Image
import requests
import torch

# load image from the IAM database
url = 'https://fki.tic.heia-fr.ch/static/img/a01-122-02-00.jpg'
image = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw).convert("RGB")

processor = TrOCRProcessor.from_pretrained('microsoft/trocr-small-stage1')
model = VisionEncoderDecoderModel.from_pretrained('microsoft/trocr-small-stage1')

# training
pixel_values = processor(image, return_tensors="pt").pixel_values  # Batch size 1
decoder_input_ids = torch.tensor([[model.config.decoder.decoder_start_token_id]])
outputs = model(pixel_values=pixel_values, decoder_input_ids=decoder_input_ids)

BibTeX entry and citation info

@misc{li2021trocr,
      title={TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models},
      author={Minghao Li and Tengchao Lv and Lei Cui and Yijuan Lu and Dinei Florencio and Cha Zhang and Zhoujun Li and Furu Wei},
      year={2021},
      eprint={2109.10282},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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