Printed Text Image Database for Sindhi OCR

Abstract

Document Image Understanding (DIU) and Electronic Document Management are active fields of research involving image understanding, interpretation, efficient handling, and routing of documents as well as their retrieval. Research on most of the noncursive scripts (Latin) has matured, whereas research on the cursive (connected) scripts is still moving toward perfection. Many researchers are currently working on the cursive scripts (Arabic and other scripts adopting it) around the world so that the difficulties and challenges in document understanding and handling of these scripts can be overcome. Sindhi script has the largest extension of the original Arabic alphabet among languages adopting the Arabic script; it contains 52 characters, compared to 28 characters in the original Arabic alphabet, in order to accommodate more sounds for the language. There are 24 differentiating characters with some possessing four dots. For Sindhi OCR research and development, a database is needed for training and testing of Sindhi text images. We have developed a large database containing over 4 billion words and 15 billion characters in 150 various fonts in four font weights and four styles. The database contents were collected from various sources including websites, books, and theses. A custom-built application was also developed to create a text image from a text document that supports various fonts and sizes. The database considers words, characters, characters with spaces, and lines. The database is freely available as a partial or full database by sending an email to one of the authors.