OCR error correction using correction patterns and self-organizing migrating algorithm

Abstract

Optical character recognition (OCR) systems help to digitize paper-based historical achieves. However, poor quality of scanned documents and limitations of text recognition techniques result in different kinds of errors in OCR outputs. Post-processing is an essential step in improving the output quality of OCR systems by detecting and cleaning the errors. In this paper, we present an automatic model consisting of both error detection and error correction phases for OCR post-processing. We propose a novel approach of OCR post-processing error correction using correction pattern edits and evolutionary algorithm which has been mainly used for solving optimization problems. Our model adopts a variant of the self-organizing migrating algorithm along with a fitness function based on modifications of important linguistic features. We illustrate how to construct the table of correction pattern edits involving all types of edit operations and being directly learned from the training dataset. Through efficient settings of the algorithm parameters, our model can be performed with high-quality candidate generation and error correction. The experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms various baseline approaches as evaluated on the benchmark dataset of ICDAR 2017 Post-OCR text correction competition.