Maximizing Recognition Reliability: TrOCR Outperforms Paddle OCR in Challenging Container Automation Environments

Abstract

Container automation systems have become increasingly important in response to the rapid growth of global trade and the need for efficient logistics. Previous research lacked a systematic comparison of advanced OCR models (PaddleOCR and TrOCR) integrated with reliable text detection (YOLO) to determine the optimal balance of speed and high accuracy under real-world port conditions. This study developed an automated pipeline combining the YOLOv10 object detector for text region localization with fine-tuned Paddle OCR and TrOCR models for recognition. Evaluation was conducted on a test set of 173 real-world images from an actual port terminal gate deployment after training on 8,899 augmented images. YOLOv10 achieved strong detection performance, recording a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 94.7% and an average Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.87. TrOCR consistently demonstrated superior recognition accuracy, achieving 98.73% exact match for ISO codes and 71.17% for container numbers, exceeding PaddleOCR (97.42% and 70.14%). However, PaddleOCR was significantly faster (up to 18.35 FPS for ISO codes) compared to TrOCR (7.93 FPS). The integrated YOLOv10 with TrOCR pipeline is recommended for reliable, high-precision text recognition, advancing automated port logistics through a scalable, AI-powered solution that prioritizes accuracy in challenging real-world scenarios.