Benchmarking multimodal document search in OpenSearch: Three approaches compared

This article benchmarks three approaches for multimodal document search in OpenSearch—ColPali, BDA modality-aware embedding, and text-only chunking—evaluating their trade-offs in search quality, latency, and complexity. The results show that while ColPali delivers superior accuracy for visually rich documents at the cost of higher latency, the BDA approach provides an optimal balance of performance and speed for most use cases.