Testing Qwen 3.5 for OCR and redaction tasks

r/LocalLLaMA
Computer Vision Open Source AI

OCR for redaction tasks are difficult for VLMs in that accurate bounding boxes for every word on a page are essential to correctly obscure words on a page. Until recently, most VLMs (particularly open source) have not been good at this task. Early in February, I posted here my tests with Qwen 3 VL 8B Instruct for bounding box OCR and redaction tasks. With its high performance on handwritten text, it seemed like it had potential to fit into a redaction workflow. Since then, Qwen 3.5 arrived, and in this post I discuss some of my early tests with these models (full post link at bottom.