Roboflow Docs

DocTR

Use the DocTR OCR model through our Serverless Cloud API

DocTR is a document OCR model deployable via our Serverless Cloud API.

DocTR API

Run DocTR through the HTTP endpoint directly with curl, or with the inference-sdk wrapper.

1

Get your API Key

Create a Roboflow account, find your key on the Roboflow API settings page and make it available to your shell:

export ROBOFLOW_API_KEY="your-key-here"
2

Run the model

Call the /doctr/ocr endpoint with curl:

curl --location 'https://serverless.roboflow.com/doctr/ocr' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
    "api_key": "'"$ROBOFLOW_API_KEY"'",
    "image": {"type": "url", "value": "https://media.roboflow.com/inference/license_plate_1.jpg"}
  }'

DocTR inference speed

Latency measured with Roboflow Inference on 1x NVIDIA L4, batch size 1, mean after warmup.

ModelLatency (ms)
doctr83.5

Measured on a full document image (text detection plus recognition).

Set api_url to match your deployment target:

  • https://serverless.roboflow.com for the Serverless Cloud API.
  • http://localhost:9001 for a local Inference server.
  • Your Dedicated Deployment URL for a private endpoint.

Run DocTR with self-hosted Inference

DocTR is a core model in Roboflow Inference, so it also runs on a server you host yourself. Start a local server, then point the same ocr_image call at it:

pip install inference-cli
inference server start  # serves http://localhost:9001
import os
from inference_sdk import InferenceHTTPClient

client = InferenceHTTPClient(
    api_url="http://localhost:9001",
    api_key=os.environ["ROBOFLOW_API_KEY"],
)

result = client.ocr_image(inference_input="./container.jpg")
print(result)

The response contains the recognized text and the inference time:

{'result': 'MSKU 0439215', 'time': 3.87}

Further reading