A segmentation-free approach to Arabic and Urdu OCR

Nazly Sabbour; Faisal Shafait

doi:10.1117/12.2003731

4 February 2013 A segmentation-free approach to Arabic and Urdu OCR

Nazly Sabbour, Faisal Shafait

Proceedings Volume 8658, Document Recognition and Retrieval XX; 86580N (2013) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2003731
Event: IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, 2013, Burlingame, California, United States

Abstract

In this paper, we present a generic Optical Character Recognition system for Arabic script languages called Nabocr. Nabocr uses OCR approaches specific for Arabic script recognition. Performing recognition on Arabic script text is relatively more difficult than Latin text due to the nature of Arabic script, which is cursive and context sensitive. Moreover, Arabic script has different writing styles that vary in complexity. Nabocr is initially trained to recognize both Urdu Nastaleeq and Arabic Naskh fonts. However, it can be trained by users to be used for other Arabic script languages. We have evaluated our system's performance for both Urdu and Arabic. In order to evaluate Urdu recognition, we have generated a dataset of Urdu text called UPTI (Urdu Printed Text Image Database), which measures different aspects of a recognition system. The performance of our system for Urdu clean text is 91%. For Arabic clean text, the performance is 86%. Moreover, we have compared the performance of our system against Tesseract's newly released Arabic recognition, and the performance of both systems on clean images is almost the same.

Citation Download Citation

Nazly Sabbour and Faisal Shafait "A segmentation-free approach to Arabic and Urdu OCR", Proc. SPIE 8658, Document Recognition and Retrieval XX, 86580N (4 February 2013); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2003731

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