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ragflow/deepdoc
eviaaaaa fa71f8d0c7 refactor(word): lazy-load DOCX images to reduce peak memory without changing output (#13233)
**Summary**
This PR tackles a significant memory bottleneck when processing
image-heavy Word documents. Previously, our pipeline eagerly decoded
DOCX images into `PIL.Image` objects, which caused high peak memory
usage. To solve this, I've introduced a **lazy-loading approach**:
images are now stored as raw blobs and only decoded exactly when and
where they are consumed.

This successfully reduces the memory footprint while keeping the parsing
output completely identical to before.

**What's Changed**
Instead of a dry file-by-file list, here is the logical breakdown of the
updates:

* **The Core Abstraction (`lazy_image.py`)**: Introduced `LazyDocxImage`
along with helper APIs to handle lazy decoding, image-type checks, and
NumPy compatibility. It also supports `.close()` and detached PIL access
to ensure safe lifecycle management and prevent memory leaks.
* **Pipeline Integration (`naive.py`, `figure_parser.py`, etc.)**:
Updated the general DOCX picture extraction to return these new lazy
images. Downstream consumers (like the figure/VLM flow and base64
encoding paths) now decode images right at the use site using detached
PIL instances, avoiding shared-instance side effects.
* **Compatibility Hooks (`operators.py`, `book.py`, etc.)**: Added
necessary compatibility conversions so these lazy images flow smoothly
through existing merging, filtering, and presentation steps without
breaking.

**Scope & What is Intentionally Left Out**
To keep this PR focused, I have restricted these changes strictly to the
**general Word pipeline** and its downstream consumers.
The `QA` and `manual` Word parsing pipelines are explicitly **not
modified** in this PR. They can be safely migrated to this new lazy-load
model in a subsequent, standalone PR.

**Design Considerations**
I briefly considered adding image compression during processing, but
decided against it to avoid any potential quality degradation in the
derived outputs. I also held off on a massive pipeline re-architecture
to avoid overly invasive changes right now.

**Validation & Testing**
I've tested this to ensure no regressions:

* Compared identical DOCX inputs before and after this branch: chunk
counts, extracted text, table HTML, and image descriptions match
perfectly.
* **Confirmed a noticeable drop in peak memory usage when processing
image-dense documents.** For a 30MB Word document containing 243 1080p
screenshots, memory consumption is reduced by approximately 1.5GB.

**Breaking Changes**
None.
2026-02-28 11:22:31 +08:00
..
2025-01-21 20:52:28 +08:00

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DeepDoc

1. Introduction

With a bunch of documents from various domains with various formats and along with diverse retrieval requirements, an accurate analysis becomes a very challenge task. DeepDoc is born for that purpose. There are 2 parts in DeepDoc so far: vision and parser. You can run the flowing test programs if you're interested in our results of OCR, layout recognition and TSR.

python deepdoc/vision/t_ocr.py -h
usage: t_ocr.py [-h] --inputs INPUTS [--output_dir OUTPUT_DIR]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --inputs INPUTS       Directory where to store images or PDFs, or a file path to a single image or PDF
  --output_dir OUTPUT_DIR
                        Directory where to store the output images. Default: './ocr_outputs'
python deepdoc/vision/t_recognizer.py -h
usage: t_recognizer.py [-h] --inputs INPUTS [--output_dir OUTPUT_DIR] [--threshold THRESHOLD] [--mode {layout,tsr}]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --inputs INPUTS       Directory where to store images or PDFs, or a file path to a single image or PDF
  --output_dir OUTPUT_DIR
                        Directory where to store the output images. Default: './layouts_outputs'
  --threshold THRESHOLD
                        A threshold to filter out detections. Default: 0.5
  --mode {layout,tsr}   Task mode: layout recognition or table structure recognition

Our models are served on HuggingFace. If you have trouble downloading HuggingFace models, this might help!!

export HF_ENDPOINT=https://hf-mirror.com

2. Vision

We use vision information to resolve problems as human being.

  • OCR. Since a lot of documents presented as images or at least be able to transform to image, OCR is a very essential and fundamental or even universal solution for text extraction.

        python deepdoc/vision/t_ocr.py --inputs=path_to_images_or_pdfs --output_dir=path_to_store_result
    

    The inputs could be directory to images or PDF, or an image or PDF. You can look into the folder 'path_to_store_result' where has images which demonstrate the positions of results, txt files which contain the OCR text.

  • Layout recognition. Documents from different domain may have various layouts, like, newspaper, magazine, book and résumé are distinct in terms of layout. Only when machine have an accurate layout analysis, it can decide if these text parts are successive or not, or this part needs Table Structure Recognition(TSR) to process, or this part is a figure and described with this caption. We have 10 basic layout components which covers most cases:

    • Text
    • Title
    • Figure
    • Figure caption
    • Table
    • Table caption
    • Header
    • Footer
    • Reference
    • Equation

    Have a try on the following command to see the layout detection results.

       python deepdoc/vision/t_recognizer.py --inputs=path_to_images_or_pdfs --threshold=0.2 --mode=layout --output_dir=path_to_store_result
    

    The inputs could be directory to images or PDF, or an image or PDF. You can look into the folder 'path_to_store_result' where has images which demonstrate the detection results as following:

  • Table Structure Recognition(TSR). Data table is a frequently used structure to present data including numbers or text. And the structure of a table might be very complex, like hierarchy headers, spanning cells and projected row headers. Along with TSR, we also reassemble the content into sentences which could be well comprehended by LLM. We have five labels for TSR task:

    • Column
    • Row
    • Column header
    • Projected row header
    • Spanning cell

    Have a try on the following command to see the layout detection results.

       python deepdoc/vision/t_recognizer.py --inputs=path_to_images_or_pdfs --threshold=0.2 --mode=tsr --output_dir=path_to_store_result
    

    The inputs could be directory to images or PDF, or a image or PDF. You can look into the folder 'path_to_store_result' where has both images and html pages which demonstrate the detection results as following:

  • Table Auto-Rotation. For scanned PDFs where tables may be incorrectly oriented (rotated 90°, 180°, or 270°), the PDF parser automatically detects the best rotation angle using OCR confidence scores before performing table structure recognition. This significantly improves OCR accuracy and table structure detection for rotated tables.

    The feature evaluates 4 rotation angles (0°, 90°, 180°, 270°) and selects the one with highest OCR confidence. After determining the best orientation, it re-performs OCR on the correctly rotated table image.

    This feature is enabled by default. You can control it via environment variable:

    # Disable table auto-rotation
    export TABLE_AUTO_ROTATE=false
    
    # Enable table auto-rotation (default)
    export TABLE_AUTO_ROTATE=true
    

    Or via API parameter:

    from deepdoc.parser import PdfParser
    
    parser = PdfParser()
    # Disable auto-rotation for this call
    boxes, tables = parser(pdf_path, auto_rotate_tables=False)
    

3. Parser

Four kinds of document formats as PDF, DOCX, EXCEL and PPT have their corresponding parser. The most complex one is PDF parser since PDF's flexibility. The output of PDF parser includes:

  • Text chunks with their own positions in PDF(page number and rectangular positions).
  • Tables with cropped image from the PDF, and contents which has already translated into natural language sentences.
  • Figures with caption and text in the figures.

Résumé

The résumé is a very complicated kind of document. A résumé which is composed of unstructured text with various layouts could be resolved into structured data composed of nearly a hundred of fields. We haven't opened the parser yet, as we open the processing method after parsing procedure.