PaddleOCR-VL

GPU-accelerated document parsing and OCR via PaddleOCR-VL. Detects layout, recognizes Chinese/English text, tables, charts, and seals in images. Use when the user asks to OCR an image, extract text from a document, parse a screenshot, or recognize text in photos. Supports vertical classical Chinese text, modern newspaper layouts, and mixed-content documents.

Jessy-Huang@jessy-huang

Install

openclaw skills install @jessy-huang/paddle-ocr-vl

PaddleOCR-VL Skill

GPU-accelerated document OCR using the PaddleOCR-VL model running inside an ephemeral Docker container. Auto-detects NVIDIA GPU architecture (Blackwell SM120 vs. standard) and selects the correct official image.

When to Use

User provides an image path and asks to "read", "OCR", or "extract text" from it
User wants to parse a document screenshot, newspaper page, or classical text
User asks about the content of an image file

Architecture

This skill includes an MCP server (server.py) that exposes three tools:

Tool	Purpose
`run_ocr`	OCR any image — provide an absolute path
`check_environment`	Verify Docker, GPU drivers, and image are ready
`run_demo`	Run OCR on bundled demo images to test the setup

Setup

1. Install the MCP Server

Add to ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (Claude Desktop) or ~/.claude/settings.json (Claude Code):

json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "paddle-ocr-vl": {
      "command": "python3",
      "args": ["<INSTALL_DIR>/server.py"]
    }
  }
}

2. Pull the Docker Image (one-time)

bash

# Blackwell GPU (RTX 50xx, B100/B200 — compute capability >= 12.0):
docker pull ccr-2vdh3abv-pub.cnc.bj.baidubce.com/paddlepaddle/paddleocr-vl:latest-nvidia-gpu-sm120

# Other NVIDIA GPU:
docker pull ccr-2vdh3abv-pub.cnc.bj.baidubce.com/paddlepaddle/paddleocr-vl:latest-nvidia-gpu

3. Verify

Call check_environment to verify everything is set up, then run_demo to test on the bundled sample images.

Bundled Demo Images

File	Content
`demo/newspaper.png`	People's Daily article about China-Eritrea relations
`demo/classical_text.png`	Records of the Three Kingdoms, vertical classical Chinese

Requirements

Docker with nvidia-container-toolkit
NVIDIA GPU with drivers installed
Python 3.10+ with mcp SDK (pip install mcp)

Security & Privacy

Images are processed inside an ephemeral Docker container (--rm flag)
The container has no network access beyond --network host (needed for GPU)
No data leaves the host machine
The container is destroyed immediately after each OCR run

External Endpoints

None. All processing is local.

Official References

PaddleOCR-VL docs: https://www.paddleocr.ai/latest/version3.x/pipeline_usage/PaddleOCR-VL.html
Blackwell-specific: https://www.paddleocr.ai/latest/version3.x/pipeline_usage/PaddleOCR-VL-NVIDIA-Blackwell.html