Chinese Image to Text
Free Chinese OCR — Simplified, measured at 100% on print.
VisionParse converts Chinese images to editable UTF-8 text free in your browser, using the Simplified Chinese model.
Measured: 100% character accuracy on a printed Simplified Chinese paragraph — every hanzi, digit and punctuation mark exact. Chinese is also our slowest measured language at 0.49 seconds, because the model searches thousands of characters instead of dozens; we publish that cost too. The measurement covers Simplified only — we have not measured Traditional, and we say so instead of claiming it.
- Free · no account
- JPG · PNG · WEBP · TIFF · BMP · HEIC
- 3 MB · 3 pages
- Deleted within 1h
Drop an image to read it
JPG, PNG, WEBP, TIFF, BMP, HEIC — up to 3 MB. Your file is read on our servers in Frankfurt and deleted within the hour.
What this tool does, in numbers.
- ACCURACY
Chinese printed text read at 100% character accuracy in our measurement, scored against exact ground truth.
- SPEED
VisionParse read a Chinese paragraph in 0.49 seconds on an 8-vCPU server.
- LANGUAGES
The Simplified Chinese model reads hanzi, mixed-in digits and CJK punctuation; text returns unsegmented, exactly as Chinese is written — without invented spaces.
- LIMIT
This measurement is Simplified Chinese only. Traditional Chinese uses a different model that we have not yet measured, so this page makes no claim for it.
- ACCESS
The Chinese image to text tool requires no account, no email address and no payment card.
- RETENTION
VisionParse deletes free-tool Chinese files one hour after conversion.
Where the 100% character accuracy comes from.
Every figure on this page traces to a dated run on hardware we name. Nothing here is a vendor estimate.
Measured 2026-08-03
- Claim
- Printed Simplified Chinese read at 100% — every character exact, at the measured cost of our slowest recognition time (0.49 s).
- Method
- VisionParse standard recognition tier, single-threaded. Full methodology.
- Sample
- A 51-character Chinese document paragraph rendered with Simplified Chinese (Han)-correct Noto type through Pango (real text shaping), read through the production pipeline with the chi_sim language model, and scored character-by-character against the exact source.
- Measured
2026-08-03on Contabo Cloud VPS 8 — 8 vCPU AMD EPYC, 24 GB RAM, Ubuntu 24.04.4- Limitations
- A 51-character sample — shorter than our other language tests because Chinese characters carry more per glyph. A single synthetic document per variant is a small sample and is not a substitute for a corpus. These figures describe format behaviour, not general accuracy. A 500-document corpus run is scheduled and will supersede them.
- Contact
- VisionParse@senithu.lk
What this tool gets wrong
Dense character shapes read perfectly at print quality. Characters like 惠顾 with a dozen strokes in a small square came back exact. At normal print resolution, stroke density was not a limiting factor at all.
The character set has a real speed cost. At 0.49 seconds our Chinese measurement is roughly twice the speed cost of European languages — the price of searching thousands of candidate characters. For bulk archives, that difference compounds.
Three steps, no account.
Drop your Chinese image
A scan, a photo or a screenshot — JPG, PNG, WEBP, TIFF, BMP and HEIC are all accepted.
We read it in the right language
This page's converter runs Chinese recognition (chi_sim) — not English recognition guessing at Simplified Chinese (Han) shapes.
Take the text
UTF-8 text appears with a confidence score. Copy it or download a .txt; the file is deleted within the hour.
What this tool accepts.
| Property | Free tool |
|---|---|
| Language model | Chinese (chi_sim), Tesseract 5 traineddata |
| Script | Simplified Chinese (Han) |
| Measured accuracy | 100% character accuracy (2026-08-03) |
| Measured speed | 0.49 s per paragraph |
| Output | Plain text, UTF-8 |
| Maximum file size | 3 MB |
| Rate limit | 5 files per hour, per IP address |
| File retention | Deleted 1 hour after conversion |
| Processing location | Frankfurt, Germany |
When to use the API instead.
This page converts one file now. To convert files from your own software, the same engine runs over HTTP from Starter upward.
# same engine, from your code curl -X POST https://api.visionparse.app/v1/ocr \ -H "x-api-key: $VISIONPARSE_KEY" \ -F "file=@image.jpg" → 202 { "jobId": "c0df8e2c…" }
Use the API when
You convert more than a few files, convert on a schedule, or need results inside another system. Batch, webhooks and bounding boxes are API-only.
Frequently asked
Does it read Traditional Chinese?
This page’s measurement is Simplified only, and we only claim what we measured. Traditional uses a separate model; until we publish a figure for it, we will not pretend to one.
Why does the output have no spaces between words?
Because written Chinese has none. The text returns exactly as printed, unsegmented — any spaces an OCR tool adds to Chinese are inventions.
Can it read mixed Chinese and English?
Yes — our test included Western digits and punctuation inside Chinese text, all read exactly. Latin letters inside Chinese documents are handled.
Is the Chinese image to text tool free?
Yes — 5 files a day with no account, no email and no card. A free account raises the allowance to 100 pages a month.
Do you keep my Chinese documents?
Free-tool files are deleted one hour after conversion, and no customer file is ever used to train models.