Issues & Challenges in Urdu OCR

Optical character recognition is a technique that is used to recognized printed and handwritten text into editable text format. There has been a lot of work done through this technology in identifying characters of different languages with variety of scripts. In which Latin scripts with isolated characters (non-cursive) like English are easy to recognize and significant advances have been made in the recognition; whereas, Arabic and its related cursive languages like Urdu have more complicated and intermingled scripts, are not much worked. This paper discusses a detail of various scripts of Urdu language also discuss issues and challenges regarding Urdu OCR. due to its cursive nature which include cursiveness, more characters dots, large set of characters for recognition, more base shape group characters, placement of dots, ambiguity between the characters and ligatures with very slight difference, context sensitive shapes, ligatures, noise, skew and fonts in Urdu OCR. This paper provides a better understanding toward all the possible engendering dilemmas related to Urdu character recognition

Novel Heuristic Recurrent Neural Network Framework to Handle Automatic Telugu Text Categorization from Handwritten Text Image

In the near future, the digitization and processing of the current paper documents describe efficient role in the creation of a paperless environment. Deep learning techniques for handwritten recognition have been extensively studied by various researchers. Deep neural networks can be trained quickly thanks to a lot of data and other algorithmic advancements. Various methods for extracting text from handwritten manuscripts have been developed in literature. To extract features from written Telugu Text image having some other neural network approaches like convolution neural network (CNN), recurrent neural networks (RNN), long short-term memory (LSTM). Different deep learning related approaches are widely used to identification of handwritten Telugu Text; various techniques are used in literature for the identification of Telugu Text from documents. For automatic identification of Telugu written script efficiently to eliminate noise and other semantic features present in Telugu Text, in this paper, proposes Novel Heuristic Advanced Neural Network based Telugu Text Categorization Model (NHANNTCM) based on sequence-to-sequence feature extraction procedure. Proposed approach extracts the features using RNN and then represents Telugu Text in sequence-to-sequence format for the identification advanced neural network performs both encoding and decoding to identify and explore visual features from sequence of Telugu Text in input data. The classification accuracy rates for Telugu words, Telugu numerals, Telugu characters, Telugu sentences, and the corresponding Telugu sentences were 99.66%, 93.63%, 91.36%, 99.05%, and 97.73% consequently. Experimental evaluation describe extracted with revealed which are textured i.e. TENG shown considerable operations in applications such as private information protection, security defense, and personal handwriting signature identification

Of Making Many Copies There is No End: The Digitization of Manuscripts and Printed Books in Arabic Script

The essay explores the relationship between writing, the digitization of manuscripts and printed books, and Digital Humanities in Middle East Eastern and Islamic Studies. It argues that the long intellectual tradition of textual pragmatism in Islamic civilization informs the current interaction with electronic texts and digital surrogates

Advanced document data extraction techniques to improve supply chain performance

In this thesis, a novel machine learning technique to extract text-based information from scanned images has been developed. This information extraction is performed in the context of scanned invoices and bills used in financial transactions. These financial transactions contain a considerable amount of data that must be extracted, refined, and stored digitally before it can be used for analysis. Converting this data into a digital format is often a time-consuming process. Automation and data optimisation show promise as methods for reducing the time required and the cost of Supply Chain Management (SCM) processes, especially Supplier Invoice Management (SIM), Financial Supply Chain Management (FSCM) and Supply Chain procurement processes. This thesis uses a cross-disciplinary approach involving Computer Science and Operational Management to explore the benefit of automated invoice data extraction in business and its impact on SCM. The study adopts a multimethod approach based on empirical research, surveys, and interviews performed on selected companies.The expert system developed in this thesis focuses on two distinct areas of research: Text/Object Detection and Text Extraction. For Text/Object Detection, the Faster R-CNN model was analysed. While this model yields outstanding results in terms of object detection, it is limited by poor performance when image quality is low. The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model is proposed in response to this limitation. The GAN model is a generator network that is implemented with the help of the Faster R-CNN model and a discriminator that relies on PatchGAN. The output of the GAN model is text data with bonding boxes. For text extraction from the bounding box, a novel data extraction framework consisting of various processes including XML processing in case of existing OCR engine, bounding box pre-processing, text clean up, OCR error correction, spell check, type check, pattern-based matching, and finally, a learning mechanism for automatizing future data extraction was designed. Whichever fields the system can extract successfully are provided in key-value format.The efficiency of the proposed system was validated using existing datasets such as SROIE and VATI. Real-time data was validated using invoices that were collected by two companies that provide invoice automation services in various countries. Currently, these scanned invoices are sent to an OCR system such as OmniPage, Tesseract, or ABBYY FRE to extract text blocks and later, a rule-based engine is used to extract relevant data. While the system’s methodology is robust, the companies surveyed were not satisfied with its accuracy. Thus, they sought out new, optimized solutions. To confirm the results, the engines were used to return XML-based files with text and metadata identified. The output XML data was then fed into this new system for information extraction. This system uses the existing OCR engine and a novel, self-adaptive, learning-based OCR engine. This new engine is based on the GAN model for better text identification. Experiments were conducted on various invoice formats to further test and refine its extraction capabilities. For cost optimisation and the analysis of spend classification, additional data were provided by another company in London that holds expertise in reducing their clients' procurement costs. This data was fed into our system to get a deeper level of spend classification and categorisation. This helped the company to reduce its reliance on human effort and allowed for greater efficiency in comparison with the process of performing similar tasks manually using excel sheets and Business Intelligence (BI) tools.The intention behind the development of this novel methodology was twofold. First, to test and develop a novel solution that does not depend on any specific OCR technology. Second, to increase the information extraction accuracy factor over that of existing methodologies. Finally, it evaluates the real-world need for the system and the impact it would have on SCM. This newly developed method is generic and can extract text from any given invoice, making it a valuable tool for optimizing SCM. In addition, the system uses a template-matching approach to ensure the quality of the extracted information

Role of images on World Wide Web readability

As the Internet and World Wide Web have grown, many good things have come. If you have access to a computer, you can find a lot of information quickly and easily. Electronic devices can store and retrieve vast amounts of data in seconds. You no longer have to leave your house to get products and services you could only get in person. Documents can be changed from English to Urdu or from text to speech almost instantly, making it easy for people from different cultures and with different abilities to talk to each other. As technology improves, web developers and website visitors want more animation, colour, and technology. As computers get faster at processing images and other graphics, web developers use them more and more. Users who can see colour, pictures, animation, and images can help understand and read the Web and improve the Web experience. People who have trouble reading or whose first language is not used on the website can also benefit from using pictures. But not all images help people understand and read the text they go with. For example, images just for decoration or picked by the people who made the website should not be used. Also, different factors could affect how easy it is to read graphical content, such as a low image resolution, a bad aspect ratio, a bad colour combination in the image itself, a small font size, etc., and the WCAG gave different rules for each of these problems. The rules suggest using alternative text, the right combination of colours, low contrast, and a higher resolution. But one of the biggest problems is that images that don't go with the text on a web page can make it hard to read the text. On the other hand, relevant pictures could make the page easier to read. A method has been suggested to figure out how relevant the images on websites are from the point of view of web readability. This method combines different ways to get information from images by using Cloud Vision API and Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and reading text from websites to find relevancy between them. Techniques for preprocessing data have been used on the information that has been extracted. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique has been used to determine what images and text on a web page have to do with each other. This tool looks at fifty educational websites' pictures and assesses their relevance. Results show that images that have nothing to do with the page's content and images that aren't very good cause lower relevancy scores. A user study was done to evaluate the hypothesis that the relevant images could enhance web readability based on two evaluations: the evaluation of the 1024 end users of the page and the heuristic evaluation, which was done by 32 experts in accessibility. The user study was done with questions about what the user knows, how they feel, and what they can do. The results back up the idea that images that are relevant to the page make it easier to read. This method will help web designers make pages easier to read by looking at only the essential parts of a page and not relying on their judgment.Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología Informática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: José Luis Lépez Cuadrado.- Secretario: Divakar Yadav.- Vocal: Arti Jai

Off-line Arabic Handwriting Recognition System Using Fast Wavelet Transform

In this research, off-line handwriting recognition system for Arabic alphabet is introduced. The system contains three main stages: preprocessing, segmentation and recognition stage. In the preprocessing stage, Radon transform was used in the design of algorithms for page, line and word skew correction as well as for word slant correction. In the segmentation stage, Hough transform approach was used for line extraction. For line to words and word to characters segmentation, a statistical method using mathematic representation of the lines and words binary image was used. Unlike most of current handwriting recognition system, our system simulates the human mechanism for image recognition, where images are encoded and saved in memory as groups according to their similarity to each other. Characters are decomposed into a coefficient vectors, using fast wavelet transform, then, vectors, that represent a character in different possible shapes, are saved as groups with one representative for each group. The recognition is achieved by comparing a vector of the character to be recognized with group representatives. Experiments showed that the proposed system is able to achieve the recognition task with 90.26% of accuracy. The system needs only 3.41 seconds a most to recognize a single character in a text of 15 lines where each line has 10 words on average

Perceptual fail: Female power, mobile technologies and images of self

Like a biological species, images of self have descended and modified throughout their journey down the ages, interweaving and recharging their viability with the necessary interjections from culture, tools and technology. Part of this journey has seen images of self also become an intrinsic function within the narratives about female power; consider Helen of Troy “a face that launched a thousand ships” (Marlowe, 1604) or Kim Kardashian (KUWTK) who heralded in the mass mediated ‘selfie’ as a social practice. The interweaving process itself sees the image oscillate between naturalized ‘icon’ and idealized ‘symbol’ of what the person looked like and/or aspired to become. These public images can confirm or constitute beauty ideals as well as influence (via imitation) behaviour and mannerisms, and as such the viewers belief in the veracity of the representative image also becomes intrinsically political manipulating the associated narratives and fostering prejudice (Dobson 2015, Korsmeyer 2004, Pollock 2003). The selfie is arguably ‘a sui generis,’ whilst it is a mediated photographic image of self, it contains its own codes of communication and decorum that fostered the formation of numerous new digital communities and influenced new media aesthetics . For example the selfie is both of nature (it is still a time based piece of documentation) and known to be perceptually untrue (filtered, modified and full of artifice). The paper will seek to demonstrate how selfie culture is infused both by considerable levels of perceptual failings that are now central to contemporary celebrity culture and its’ notion of glamour which in turn is intrinsically linked (but not solely defined) by the province of feminine desire for reinvention, transformation or “self-sexualisation” (Hall, West and McIntyre, 2012). The subject, like the Kardashians or selfies, is divisive. In conclusion this paper will explore the paradox of the perceptual failings at play within selfie culture more broadly, like ‘Reality TV’ selfies are infamously fake yet seem to provide Debord’s (1967) illusory cultural opiate whilst fulfilling a cultural longing. Questions then emerge when considering the narrative impact of these trends on engendered power structures and the traditional status of illusion and narrative fiction

Biometrics Writer Recognition for Arabic language: Analysis and Classification techniques using Subwords Features

Handwritten text in any language is believed to convey a great deal of information about writers’ personality and identity. Indeed, handwritten signature has long been accepted as an authentication of the writer’s physical stamp on financial and legal deals as well official/personal documents and works of art. Handwritten documents are frequently used as evidences in forensic tasks. Handwriting skills is learnt and developed from the early schooling stages. Research interest in behavioral biometrics was the main driving force behind the growth in research into Writer Identification (WI) from handwritten text, but recent rise in terrorism associated with extreme religious ideologies spreading primarily, but not exclusively, from the middle-east has led to a surge of interest in WI from handwritten text in Arabic and similar languages. This thesis is the main outcome of extensive research investigations conducted with the aim of developing an automatic identification of a person from handwritten Arabic text samples. My motivations and interests, as an Iraqi researcher, emanate from my multi-faceted desires to provide scientific support for my people in their fight against terrorism by providing forensic evidences, and as contribute to the ongoing digitization of the Iraqi National archive as well as the wealth of religious and historical archives in Iraq and the middle-east. Good knowledge of the underlying language is invaluable in this project. Despite the rising interest in this recognition modality worldwide, Arabic writer identification has not been addressed as extensively as Latin writer identification. However, in recent years some new Arabic writer identification approaches have been proposed some of which are reviewed in this thesis. Arabic is a cursive language when handwritten. This means that each and every writer in this language develops some unique features that could demonstrate writer’s habits and style. These habits and styles are considered as unique WI features and determining factors. Existing dominating approaches to WI are based on recognizing handwriting habits/styles are embedded in certain parts/components of the written texts. Although the appearance of these components within long text contain rich information and clues to writer identity, the most common approaches to WI in Arabic in the literature are based on features extracted from paragraph(s), line(s), word(s), character(s), and/or a part of a character. Generally, Arabic words are made up of one or more subwords at the end of each; there is a connected stroke with a certain style of which seem to be most representative of writers habits. Another feature of Arabic writing is to do with diacritics that are added to written words/subwords, to add meaning and pronunciation. Subwords are more frequent in written Arabic text and appear as part of several different words or as full individual words. Thus, we propose a new innovative approach based on a seemingly plausible hypothesis that subwords based WI yields significant increase in accuracy over existing approaches. The thesis most significant contributions can be summarized as follows: - Developed a high performing segmentation of scanned text images, that combines threshold based binarisation, morphological operation and active shape model. - Defined digital measures and formed a 15-dimensional feature vectors representations of subwords that implicitly cover its diacritics and strokes. A pilot study that incrementally added features according to writer discriminating power. This reduced subwords feature vector dimension to 8, two of which were modelled as time series. - For the dependent 8-dimensional WI scheme, we identify the best performing set of subwords (best 22 subwords out of 49 then followed by best 11 out of these 22 subwords). - We established the validity of our hypothesis for different versions of subwords based WI schemes by providing empirical evidence when testing on a number of existing text dependent and in text-dependent databases plus a simulated text-in text-dependent DB. The text-dependent scenario results exhibited possible present of the Doddington Zoo phenomena. - The final optimal subword based WI scheme, not only removes the need to include diacritics as part of the subword but also demonstrating that including diacritics within subwords impairs the WI discriminating power of subwords. This should not be taken to discredit research that are based on diacritics based WI. Also in this subword body (without diacritics) base WI scheme, resulted in eliminating the presence of Doddington Zoo effect. - Finally, a significant but un-intended consequence of using subwords for WI is that there is no difference between a text-independent scenario and text-dependent one. In fact, we shall demonstrate that the text-dependent database of the 27-words can be used to simulate the testing of the scheme for an in text-dependent database without the need to record such a DB. Finally, we discussed ways of optimising the performance of our last scheme by considering possible ways of complementing our scheme using the addition of various image texture analysis features to be extracted from subwords, lines, paragraphs or entire file of the scabbed image. These included LBP and Gabor Filter. We also suggested the possible addition of few more features

Off-line Arabic Handwriting Recognition System Using Fast Wavelet Transform

In this research, off-line handwriting recognition system for Arabic alphabet is introduced. The system contains three main stages: preprocessing, segmentation and recognition stage. In the preprocessing stage, Radon transform was used in the design of algorithms for page, line and word skew correction as well as for word slant correction. In the segmentation stage, Hough transform approach was used for line extraction. For line to words and word to characters segmentation, a statistical method using mathematic representation of the lines and words binary image was used. Unlike most of current handwriting recognition system, our system simulates the human mechanism for image recognition, where images are encoded and saved in memory as groups according to their similarity to each other. Characters are decomposed into a coefficient vectors, using fast wavelet transform, then, vectors, that represent a character in different possible shapes, are saved as groups with one representative for each group. The recognition is achieved by comparing a vector of the character to be recognized with group representatives. Experiments showed that the proposed system is able to achieve the recognition task with 90.26% of accuracy. The system needs only 3.41 seconds a most to recognize a single character in a text of 15 lines where each line has 10 words on average