This technical report presents the 600K-KS-OCR Dataset, a large-scale synthetic corpus comprising approximately 602,000 word-level segmented images designed for training and evaluating optical character recognition systems targeting Kashmiri script. The dataset addresses a critical resource gap for Kashmiri, an endangered Dardic language utilizing a modified Perso-Arabic writing system spoken by approximately seven million people. Each image is rendered at 256x64 pixels with corresponding ground-truth transcriptions provided in multiple formats compatible with CRNN, TrOCR, and generalpurpose machine learning pipelines. The generation methodology incorporates three traditional Kashmiri typefaces, comprehensive data augmentation simulating real-world document degradation, and diverse background textures to enhance model robustness. The dataset is distributed across ten partitioned archives totaling approximately 10.6 GB and is released under the CC-BY-4.0 license to facilitate research in low-resource language optical character recognition.
In this work we propose an OCR scheme for manuscripts printed in Rashi font that is an ancient Hebrew font and corresponding dialect used in religious Jewish literature, for more than 600 years. The proposed scheme utilizes a convolution neural network (CNN) for visual inference and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) to learn the Rashi scripts dialect. In particular, we derive an AutoML scheme to optimize the CNN architecture, and a book-specific CNN training to improve the OCR accuracy. The proposed scheme achieved an accuracy of more than 99.8% using a dataset of more than 3M annotated letters fr…
We describe a novel line-level script identification method. Previous work repurposed an OCR model generating per-character script codes, counted to obtain line-level script identification. This has two shortcomings. First, as a sequence-to-sequence model it is more complex than necessary for the sequence-to-label problem of line script identification. This makes it harder to train and inefficient to run. Second, the counting heuristic may be suboptimal compared to a learned model. Therefore we reframe line script identification as a sequence-to-label problem and solve it using two components,…
A Kannada OCR, named Lipi Gnani, has been designed and developed from scratch, with the motivation of it being able to convert printed text or poetry in Kannada script, without any restriction on vocabulary. The training and test sets have been collected from over 35 books published between the period 1970 to 2002, and this includes books written in Halegannada and pages containing Sanskrit slokas written in Kannada script. The coverage of the OCR is nearly complete in the sense that it recognizes all the punctuation marks, special symbols, Indo-Arabic and Kannada numerals and also the intersp…
Techno India College of Technology（Techno India 技术学院）；Jadavpur University（jadavpur 大学）
In the present work, we have used Tesseract 2.01 open source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Engine under Apache License 2.0 for recognition of handwriting samples of lower case Roman script. Handwritten isolated and free-flow text samples were collected from multiple users. Tesseract is trained to recognize user-specific handwriting samples of both the categories of document pages. On a single user model, the system is trained with 1844 isolated handwritten characters and the performance is tested on 1133 characters, taken form the test set. The overall character-level accuracy of the sys…
University Sains Malaysia（马来西亚理科大学）；University of Sindh（信德大学）
A large number of publications are available for the Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Significant researches, as well as articles are present for the Latin, Chinese and Japanese scripts. Arabic script is also one of mature script from OCR perspective. The adaptive languages which share Arabic script or its extended characters; still lacking the OCRs for their language. In this paper we present the efforts of researchers on Arabic and its related and adapted languages. This survey is organized in different sections, in which introduction is followed by properties of Sindhi Language. OCR pro…
Leipzig University（莱比锡大学）；Aga Khan University（阿迦汗大学）；Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校罗尚波斯研究中心）
The OpenITI team has achieved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy rates for classical Arabic-script texts in the high nineties. These numbers are based on our tests of seven different Arabic-script texts of varying quality and typefaces, totaling over 7,000 lines. These accuracy rates not only represent a distinct improvement over the actual accuracy rates of the various proprietary OCR options for classical Arabic-script texts, but, equally important, they are produced using an open-source OCR software, thus enabling us to make this Arabic-script OCR technology freely available to th…
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）
Telugu is a Dravidian language spoken by more than 80 million people worldwide. The optical character recognition (OCR) of the Telugu script has wide ranging applications including education, health-care, administration etc. The beautiful Telugu script however is very different from Germanic scripts like English and German. This makes the use of transfer learning of Germanic OCR solutions to Telugu a non-trivial task. To address the challenge of OCR for Telugu, we make three contributions in this work: (i) a database of Telugu characters, (ii) a deep learning based OCR algorithm, and (iii) a c…
Recent advances in OCR have shown that an end-to-end (E2E) training pipeline that includes both detection and recognition leads to the best results. However, many existing methods focus primarily on Latin-alphabet languages, often even only case-insensitive English characters. In this paper, we propose an E2E approach, Multiplexed Multilingual Mask TextSpotter, that performs script identification at the word level and handles different scripts with different recognition heads, all while maintaining a unified loss that simultaneously optimizes script identification and multiple recognition head…
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of extracting digitized text from images of scanned documents. While OCR systems have already matured in many languages, they still have shortcomings in cursive languages with overlapping letters such as the Arabic language. This paper proposes a complete Arabic OCR system that takes a scanned image of Arabic Naskh script as an input and generates a corresponding digital document. Our Arabic OCR system consists of the following modules: Pre-processing, Word-level Feature Extraction, Character Segmentation, Character Recognition, and Post-proce…
India is a multilingual multi-script country. In every state of India there are two languages one is state local language and the other is English. For example in Andhra Pradesh, a state in India, the document may contain text words in English and Telugu script. For Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of such a bilingual document, it is necessary to identify the script before feeding the text words to the OCRs of individual scripts. In this paper, we are introducing a simple and efficient technique of script identification for Kannada, English and Hindi text words of a printed document. The pr…
Society for Natural Language Technology Research（自然语言技术研究协会）；Techno India University（Techno印度大学）
This paper presents a printed Bengali and English text OCR system developed by us using a single hidden BLSTM-CTC architecture having 128 units. Here, we did not use any peephole connection and dropout in the BLSTM, which helped us in getting better accuracy. This architecture was trained by 47,720 text lines that include English words also. When tested over 20 different Bengali fonts, it has produced character level accuracy of 99.32% and word level accuracy of 96.65%. A good Indic multi script OCR system is also developed by Google. It sometimes recognizes a character of Bengali into the sam…
In this paper we evaluate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of 19th century Fraktur scripts without book-specific training using mixed models, i.e. models trained to recognize a variety of fonts and typesets from previously unseen sources. We describe the training process leading to strong mixed OCR models and compare them to freely available models of the popular open source engines OCRopus and Tesseract as well as the commercial state of the art system ABBYY. For evaluation, we use a varied collection of unseen data from books, journals, and a dictionary from the 19th century. The experime…
Planet AI GmbH（Planet AI公司）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；Rostock University（罗斯托克大学）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）
In order to apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to historical printings of Latin script fully automatically, we report on our efforts to construct a widely-applicable polyfont recognition model yielding text with a Character Error Rate (CER) around 2% when applied out-of-the-box. Moreover, we show how this model can be further finetuned to specific classes of printings with little manual and computational effort. The mixed or polyfont model is trained on a wide variety of materials, in terms of age (from the 15th to the 19th century), typography (various types of Fraktur and Antiqua), an…
ReceiptSense: Beyond Traditional OCR -- A Dataset for Receipt Understanding
Innsbruck University（因斯布鲁克大学）；High Institute for Computers（计算机与管理信息高级学院）；Chungbuk National University（Chungbuk国立大学）；Louisville University（路易斯维尔大学）；University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学）
M. S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology（M. S. 拉迈亚理工学院）
Intensive research has been done on optical character recognition ocr and a large number of articles have been published on this topic during the last few decades. Many commercial OCR systems are now available in the market, but most of these systems work for Roman, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic characters. There are no sufficient number of works on Indian language character recognition especially Kannada script among 12 major scripts in India. This paper presents a review of existing work on printed Kannada script and their results. The characteristics of Kannada script and Kannada Character R…
Techno India College of Technology（Techno India 技术学院）；Jadavpur University（贾达沃普尔大学）；Hitachi Limited（日立有限公司）
Objective of the current work is to develop an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine for information Just In Time (iJIT) system that can be used for recognition of handwritten textual annotations of lower case Roman script. Tesseract open source OCR engine under Apache License 2.0 is used to develop user-specific handwriting recognition models, viz., the language sets, for the said system, where each user is identified by a unique identification tag associated with the digital pen. To generate the language set for any user, Tesseract is trained with labeled handwritten data samples of iso…
A line of a bilingual document page may contain text words in regional language and numerals in English. For Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of such a document page, it is necessary to identify different script forms before running an individual OCR system. In this paper, we have identified a tool of morphological opening by reconstruction of an image in different directions and regional descriptors for script identification at word level, based on the observation that every text has a distinct visual appearance. The proposed system is developed for three Indian major bilingual documents, …
When Do VLMs Help Arabic Manuscript OCR? A Cross-Dataset Study
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；Northwestern University in Qatar（卡塔尔西北大学）；University of Doha for Science Technology（多哈科技大学）
Cochin University of Science and Technology（科钦科技大学）
Handwritten character recognition is always a frontier area of research in the field of pattern recognition and image processing and there is a large demand for OCR on hand written documents. Even though, sufficient studies have performed in foreign scripts like Chinese, Japanese and Arabic characters, only a very few work can be traced for handwritten character recognition of Indian scripts especially for the South Indian scripts. This paper provides an overview of offline handwritten character recognition in South Indian Scripts, namely Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada and Telungu.
Multi-Expert Routing for Multi-Domain Low-Resource OCR: A Manchu Case Study
Institute of Advanced Studies, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学高等研究院）；Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University–Hong Kong Baptist University United International College (UIC)（北京师范大学-香港浸会大学联合国际学院人文与社会科学学部）；Department of Applied History, National Chiayi University（国立嘉义大学应用历史系）
Visual Merit or Linguistic Crutch? A Close Look at DeepSeek-OCR
Chengdu Institute of Computer Applications, CAS（成都计算机应用研究所，中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；IMRAM, Tohoku University（东大理工学院IMRAM）；China Tower Corporation Limited（中国塔公司）；CSIS, Tohoku University（东大理工学院CSIS）；National Institute for Materials Science（国家材料科学研究所）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, CAS（深圳先进技术研究所，中国科学院）；Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology（深圳先进技术大学人工智能研究院）
In this paper, we address the task of Optical Character Recognition(OCR) for the Telugu script. We present an end-to-end framework that segments the text image, classifies the characters and extracts lines using a language model. The segmentation is based on mathematical morphology. The classification module, which is the most challenging task of the three, is a deep convolutional neural network. The language is modelled as a third degree markov chain at the glyph level. Telugu script is a complex alphasyllabary and the language is agglutinative, making the problem hard. In this paper we apply…
Chronicles-OCR: A Cross-Temporal Perception Benchmark for the Evolutionary Trajectory of Chinese Characters
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（信息工程研究所，中国科学院）；Tencent（腾讯）；Anyang Normal University（安阳师范学院）；The Palace Museum（故宫博物院）；Nankai University（南开大学）
All-in-One Multilingual Scene Text Recognition with Script-aware Mixture-of-Experts
Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University（复旦大学可信具身智能研究院）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Multimodal Embodied AI（上海多模态具身智能重点实验室）；WeChat Vision, Tencent Inc.（腾讯微信视觉团队）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
In this paper we describe a dataset of German and Latin \textit{ground truth} (GT) for historical OCR in the form of printed text line images paired with their transcription. This dataset, called \textit{GT4HistOCR}, consists of 313,173 line pairs covering a wide period of printing dates from incunabula from the 15th century to 19th century books printed in Fraktur types and is openly available under a CC-BY 4.0 license. The special form of GT as line image/transcription pairs makes it directly usable to train state-of-the-art recognition models for OCR software employing recurring neural netw…
Researches have been done on Ethiopic scripts. However studies excluded the Geez numbers from the studies because of different reasons. This paper presents offline handwritten and machine printed Geez number recognition using feed forward back propagation artificial neural network. On this study, different Geez image characters were collected from google image search and three persons are instructed to write the numbers using pencil. In total we have collected 560 numbers of characters. We have used 460 of the characters for training and 100 are used for testing. Accordingly we have achieved o…
In a multilingual country like India where 12 different official scripts are in use, automatic identification of handwritten script facilitates many important applications such as automatic transcription of multilingual documents, searching for documents on the web/digital archives containing a particular script and for the selection of script specific Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system in a multilingual environment. In this paper, we propose a robust method towards identifying scripts from the handwritten documents at text line-level. The recognition is based upon features extracted u…
This report explores the latest advances in the field of digital document recognition. With the focus on printed document imagery, we discuss the major developments in optical character recognition (OCR) and document image enhancement/restoration in application to Latin and non-Latin scripts. In addition, we review and discuss the available technologies for hand-written document recognition. In this report, we also provide some company-accumulated benchmark results on available OCR engines.
Systematic Literature Review of Machine Learning Models and Applications for Text Recognition
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia（马来西亚工艺大学电气工程学院）；Faculty of Artificial Intelligence, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia（马来西亚工艺大学人工智能学院）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, American International University-Bangladesh（孟加拉国美国国际大学电气与电子工程系）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences（巴基斯坦俾路支省信息技术、工程与管理科学大学电气工程系）
Techno India College of Technology（Techno India 技术学院）；Jadavpur University（Jadavpur 大学）
The objective of the paper is to recognize handwritten samples of lower case Roman script using Tesseract open source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine under Apache License 2.0. Handwritten data samples containing isolated and free-flow text were collected from different users. Tesseract is trained with user-specific data samples of both the categories of document pages to generate separate user-models representing a unique language-set. Each such language-set recognizes isolated and free-flow handwritten test samples collected from the designated user. On a three user model, the syst…
A considerable amount of success has been achieved in developing monolingual OCR systems for Indic scripts. But in a country like India, where multi-script scenario is prevalent, identifying scripts beforehand becomes obligatory. In this paper, we present the significance of Gabor wavelets filters in extracting directional energy and entropy distributions for 11 official handwritten scripts namely, Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurumukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and Roman. The experimentation is conducted at block level based on a quad-tree decomposition approach and eva…
Classifying pages or text lines into font categories aids transcription because single font Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is generally more accurate than omni-font OCR. We present a simple framework based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), where a CNN is trained to classify small patches of text into predefined font classes. To classify page or line images, we average the CNN predictions over densely extracted patches. We show that this method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a challenging dataset of 40 Arabic computer fonts with 98.8\% line level accuracy. This same method…
Precise character segmentation is the only solution towards higher Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracy. In cursive script, overlapped characters are serious issue in the process of character segmentations as characters are deprived from their discriminative parts using conventional linear segmentation strategy. Hence, non-linear segmentation is an utmost need to avoid loss of characters parts and to enhance character/script recognition accuracy. This paper presents an improved approach for non-linear segmentation of the overlapped characters in handwritten roman script. The proposed t…
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）
This paper focuses on the problem of script identification in scene text images. Facing this problem with state of the art CNN classifiers is not straightforward, as they fail to address a key characteristic of scene text instances: their extremely variable aspect ratio. Instead of resizing input images to a fixed aspect ratio as in the typical use of holistic CNN classifiers, we propose here a patch-based classification framework in order to preserve discriminative parts of the image that are characteristic of its class. We describe a novel method based on the use of ensembles of conjoined ne…
Diacritic characters can be considered as a unique set of characters providing us with adequate and significant clue in identifying a given language with considerably high accuracy. Diacritics, though associated with phonetics often serve as a distinguishing feature for many languages especially the ones with a Latin script. In this proposed work, we aim to identify language of text in images using the presence of diacritic characters in order to improve Optical Character Recognition (OCR) performance in any given automated environment. We showcase our work across 13 Latin languages encompassi…
Université de Lausanne（洛桑大学）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Mount Allison University（蒙特爱立森大学）
Together with critical editions and translations, commentaries are one of the main genres of publication in literary and textual scholarship, and have a century-long tradition. Yet, the exploitation of thousands of digitized historical commentaries was hitherto hindered by the poor quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), especially on commentaries to Greek texts. In this paper, we evaluate the performances of two pipelines suitable for the OCR of historical classical commentaries. Our results show that Kraken + Ciaconna reaches a substantially lower character error rate (CER) than Tess…
HunyuanOCR-1.5: Making Lightweight OCR VLMs Faster and Better
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；Large Language Model Department, Tencent（腾讯大语言模型部）；Nankai University（南开大学）
研究改进轻量级端到端OCR视觉语言模型。基于HunyuanOCR-1.0架构，用DFlash提升效率，提出Agentic Data Flow增强能力，在多任务表现出色，还将发布模型权重和代码。
We report upon the results of a research and prototype building project \emph{Worldly~OCR} dedicated to developing new, more accurate image-to-text conversion software for several languages and writing systems. These include the cursive scripts Farsi and Pashto, and Latin cursive scripts. We also describe approaches geared towards Traditional Chinese, which is non-cursive, but features an extremely large character set of 65,000 characters. Our methodology is based on Machine Learning, especially Deep Learning, and Data Science, and is directed towards vast quantities of original documents, exc…
