# RECENT UPDATES
- 2021.12.21 OCR open source online course starts. The lesson starts at 8:30 every night and lasts for ten days. Free registration: https://aistudio.baidu.com/aistudio/course/introduce/25207
- 2021.12.21 release PaddleOCR v2.4, release 1 text detection algorithm (PSENet), 3 text recognition algorithms (NRTR、SEED、SAR), 1 key information extraction algorithm (SDMGR) and 3 DocVQA algorithms (LayoutLM、LayoutLMv2，LayoutXLM).
- 2021.9.7 release PaddleOCR v2.3, [PP-OCRv2](#PP-OCRv2) is proposed. The CPU inference speed of PP-OCRv2 is 220% higher than that of PP-OCR server. The F-score of PP-OCRv2 is 7% higher than that of PP-OCR mobile.
- 2021.8.3 released PaddleOCR v2.2, add a new structured documents analysis toolkit, i.e., [PP-Structure](https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/release/2.2/ppstructure/README.md), support layout analysis and table recognition (One-key to export chart images to Excel files).
- 2021.4.8 release end-to-end text recognition algorithm [PGNet](https://www.aaai.org/AAAI21Papers/AAAI-2885.WangP.pdf) which is published in AAAI 2021. Find tutorial [here](https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/release/2.1/doc/doc_en/pgnet_en.md)；release multi language recognition [models](https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/release/2.1/doc/doc_en/multi_languages_en.md), support more than 80 languages recognition; especically, the performance of [English recognition model](https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/release/2.1/doc/doc_en/models_list_en.md#English) is Optimized.

- 2021.1.21 update more than 25+ multilingual recognition models [models list](./models_list_en.md), including：English, Chinese, German, French, Japanese，Spanish，Portuguese Russia Arabic and so on.  Models for more languages will continue to be updated [Develop Plan](https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/issues/1048).
- 2020.12.15 update Data synthesis tool, i.e., [Style-Text](../../StyleText/README.md)，easy to synthesize a large number of images which are similar to the target scene image.
- 2020.11.25 Update a new data annotation tool, i.e., [PPOCRLabel](../../PPOCRLabel/README.md), which is helpful to improve the labeling efficiency. Moreover, the labeling results can be used in training of the PP-OCR system directly.
- 2020.9.22 Update the PP-OCR technical article, https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09941
- 2020.9.19 Update the ultra lightweight compressed ppocr_mobile_slim series models, the overall model size is 3.5M, suitable for mobile deployment.
- 2020.9.17 update English recognition model and Multilingual recognition model, `English`, `Chinese`, `German`, `French`, `Japanese` and `Korean` have been supported. Models for more languages will continue to be updated.
- 2020.8.24 Support the use of PaddleOCR through whl package installation，pelease refer  [PaddleOCR Package](https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/blob/develop/doc/doc_en/whl_en.md)
- 2020.8.16 Release text detection algorithm [SAST](https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.05498) and text recognition algorithm [SRN](https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.12294)
- 2020.7.23, Release the playback and PPT of live class on BiliBili station, PaddleOCR Introduction, [address](https://aistudio.baidu.com/aistudio/course/introduce/1519)
- 2020.7.15, Add mobile App demo , support both iOS and  Android  ( based on easyedge and Paddle Lite)
- 2020.7.15, Improve the  deployment ability, add the C + +  inference , serving deployment. In addtion, the benchmarks of the ultra-lightweight Chinese OCR model are provided.
- 2020.7.15, Add several related datasets, data annotation and synthesis tools.
- 2020.7.9 Add a new model to support recognize the  character "space".
- 2020.7.9 Add the data augument and learning rate decay strategies during training.
- 2020.6.8 Add [datasets](./datasets_en.md) and keep updating
- 2020.6.5 Support exporting `attention` model to `inference_model`
- 2020.6.5 Support separate prediction and recognition, output result score
- 2020.5.30 Provide Lightweight Chinese OCR online experience
- 2020.5.30 Model prediction and training support on Windows system
- 2020.5.30 Open source general Chinese OCR model
- 2020.5.14 Release [PaddleOCR Open Class](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1nf4y1U7RX?p=4)
- 2020.5.14 Release [PaddleOCR Practice Notebook](https://aistudio.baidu.com/aistudio/projectdetail/467229)
- 2020.5.14 Open source 8.6M lightweight Chinese OCR model
