PaddleOCR

How to integrate W&B with PaddleOCR.

3 minute read

PaddleOCR aims to create multilingual, awesome, leading, and practical OCR tools that help users train better models and apply them into practice implemented in PaddlePaddle. PaddleOCR support a variety of cutting-edge algorithms related to OCR, and developed industrial solution. PaddleOCR now comes with a Weights & Biases integration for logging training and evaluation metrics along with model checkpoints with corresponding metadata.

Example Blog & Colab

Read here to see how to train a model with PaddleOCR on the ICDAR2015 dataset. This also comes with a Google Colab and the corresponding live W&B dashboard is available here. There is also a Chinese version of this blog here: W&B对您的OCR模型进行训练和调试

An API key authenticates your machine to W&B. You can generate an API key from your user profile.

For a more streamlined approach, you can generate an API key by going directly to https://wandb.ai/authorize. Copy the displayed API key and save it in a secure location such as a password manager.

Click your user profile icon in the upper right corner.
Select User Settings, then scroll to the API Keys section.
Click Reveal. Copy the displayed API key. To hide the API key, reload the page.

Install the `wandb` library and log in

To install the wandb library locally and log in:

Set the WANDB_API_KEY environment variable to your API key.
```
export WANDB_API_KEY=<your_api_key>
```
Install the wandb library and log in.
```
pip install wandb

wandb login
```

pip install wandb

import wandb
wandb.login()

!pip install wandb

import wandb
wandb.login()

Add wandb to your `config.yml` file

PaddleOCR requires configuration variables to be provided using a yaml file. Adding the following snippet at the end of the configuration yaml file will automatically log all training and validation metrics to a W&B dashboard along with model checkpoints:

Global:
    use_wandb: True

Any additional, optional arguments that you might like to pass to wandb.init can also be added under the wandb header in the yaml file:

wandb:  
    project: CoolOCR  # (optional) this is the wandb project name 
    entity: my_team   # (optional) if you're using a wandb team, you can pass the team name here
    name: MyOCRModel  # (optional) this is the name of the wandb run