Advancements and Challenges in Arabic Optical Character Recognition: A Comprehensive Survey

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a vital process that involves the extraction of handwritten or printed text from scanned or printed images, converting it into a format that can be understood and processed by machines. This enables further data processing activities such as searching and editing. The automatic extraction of text through OCR plays a crucial role in digitizing documents, enhancing productivity, improving accessibility, and preserving historical records. This paper seeks to offer an exhaustive review of contemporary applications, methodologies, and challenges associated with Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR). A thorough analysis is conducted on prevailing techniques utilized throughout the OCR process, with a dedicated effort to discern the most efficacious approaches that demonstrate enhanced outcomes. To ensure a thorough evaluation, a meticulous keyword-search methodology is adopted, encompassing a comprehensive analysis of articles relevant to Arabic OCR, including both backward and forward citation reviews. In addition to presenting cutting-edge techniques and methods, this paper critically identifies research gaps within the realm of Arabic OCR. By highlighting these gaps, we shed light on potential areas for future exploration and development, thereby guiding researchers toward promising avenues in the field of Arabic OCR. The outcomes of this study provide valuable insights for researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders involved in Arabic OCR, ultimately fostering advancements in the field and facilitating the creation of more accurate and efficient OCR systems for the Arabic language

Generative vs. Discriminative Recognition Models for Off-Line Arabic Handwriting

The majority of handwritten word recognition strategies are constructed on learning-based generative frameworks from letter or word training samples. Theoretically, constructing recognition models through discriminative learning should be the more effective alternative. The primary goal of this research is to compare the performances of discriminative and generative recognition strategies, which are described by generatively-trained hidden Markov modeling (HMM), discriminatively-trained conditional random fields (CRF) and discriminatively-trained hidden-state CRF (HCRF). With learning samples obtained from two dissimilar databases, we initially trained and applied an HMM classification scheme. To enable HMM classifiers to effectively reject incorrect and out-of-vocabulary segmentation, we enhance the models with adaptive threshold schemes. Aside from proposing such schemes for HMM classifiers, this research introduces CRF and HCRF classifiers in the recognition of offline Arabic handwritten words. Furthermore, the efficiencies of all three strategies are fully assessed using two dissimilar databases. Recognition outcomes for both words and letters are presented, with the pros and cons of each strategy emphasized