Arabic Printed Text Image Database Research Articles

Arabic optical character recognition software: A review

This paper provides a thorough evaluation of a set of six important Arabic OCR systems available in the market; namely: Abbyy FineReader, Leadtools, Readiris, Sakhr, Tesseract and NovoVerus. We test the OCR systems using a randomly selected images from the well known Arabic Printed Text Image database (250 images from the APTI database) and using a set of 8 images from an Arabic book. The APTI database contains 45.313.600 of both decomposable and non-decomposable word images. In the evaluation, we conduct two tests. The first test is based on usual metrics used in the literature. In the second test, we provide a novel measure for Arabic language, which can be used for other non-Latin languages.

Window repositioning for printed Arabic recognition

• We use windowed Bernoulli HMMs with repositioning for printed Arabic recognition. • Exhaustive experiments are conducted on the Arabic Printed Text Image database. • Recognition accuracy is greatly improved by the use of repositioning. • Proper adjustment of key parameters and model topology also improves results. • The results obtained in this work are by large the best results published so far. Bernoulli HMMs are conventional HMMs in which the emission probabilities are modeled with Bernoulli mixtures. They have recently been applied, with good results, in off-line text recognition in many languages, in particular, Arabic. A key idea that has proven to be very effective in this application of Bernoulli HMMs is the use of a sliding window of adequate width for feature extraction. This idea has allowed us to obtain very competitive results in the recognition of both Arabic handwriting and printed text. Indeed, a system based on it ranked first at the ICDAR 2011 Arabic recognition competition on the Arabic Printed Text Image (APTI) database. More recently, this idea has been refined by using repositioning techniques for extracted windows, leading to further improvements in Arabic handwriting recognition. In the case of printed text, this refinement led to an improved system which ranked second at the ICDAR 2013 second competition on APTI, only at a marginal distance from the best system. In this work, we describe the development of this improved system. Following evaluation protocols similar to those of the competitions on APTI, exhaustive experiments are detailed from which state-of-the-art results are obtained.