Neural Networks for Handwritten English Alphabet Recognition

This paper demonstrates the use of neural networks for developing a system that can recognize hand-written English alphabets. In this system, each English alphabet is represented by binary values that are used as input to a simple feature extraction system, whose output is fed to our neural network system.Comment: 5 pages, 3 Figure, ISSN:0975 - 888

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

Advanced approach for Moroccan administrative documents digitization using pre-trained models CNN-based: character recognition

In the digital age, efficient digitization of administrative documents is a real challenge, particularly for languages with complex scripts such as those used in Moroccan documents. The subject matter of this article is the digitization of Moroccan administrative documents using pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for advanced character recognition. This research aims to address the unique challenges of accurately digitizing various Moroccan scripts and layouts, which are crucial in the digital transformation of administrative processes. Our goal was to develop an efficient and highly accurate character recognition system specifically tailored for Moroccan administrative texts. The tasks involved comprehensive analysis and customization of pre-trained CNN models and rigorous performance testing against a diverse dataset of Moroccan administrative documents. The methodology entailed a detailed evaluation of different CNN architectures trained on a dataset representative of various types of characters used in Moroccan administrative documents. This ensured the adaptability of the models to real-world scenarios, with a focus on accuracy and efficiency in character recognition. The results were remarkable. DenseNet121 achieved a 95.78% accuracy rate on the Alphabet dataset, whereas VGG16 recorded a 99.24% accuracy on the Digits dataset. DenseNet169 demonstrated 94.00% accuracy on the Arabic dataset, 99.9% accuracy on the Tifinagh dataset, and 96.24% accuracy on the French Special Characters dataset. Furthermore, DenseNet169 attained 99.14% accuracy on the Symbols dataset. In addition, ResNet50 achieved 99.90% accuracy on the Character Type dataset, enabling accurate determination of the dataset to which a character belongs. In conclusion, this study signifies a substantial advancement in the field of Moroccan administrative document digitization. The CNN-based approach showcased in this study significantly outperforms traditional character recognition methods. These findings not only contribute to the digital processing and management of documents but also open new avenues for future research in adapting this technology to other languages and document types

Novel Perspectives for the Management of Multilingual and Multialphabetic Heritages through Automatic Knowledge Extraction: The DigitalMaktaba Approach

The linguistic and social impact of multiculturalism can no longer be neglected in any sector, creating the urgent need of creating systems and procedures for managing and sharing cultural heritages in both supranational and multi-literate contexts. In order to achieve this goal, text sensing appears to be one of the most crucial research areas. The long-term objective of the DigitalMaktaba project, born from interdisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists, historians, librarians, engineers and linguists, is to establish procedures for the creation, management and cataloguing of archival heritage in non-Latin alphabets. In this paper, we discuss the currently ongoing design of an innovative workflow and tool in the area of text sensing, for the automatic extraction of knowledge and cataloguing of documents written in non-Latin languages (Arabic, Persian and Azerbaijani). The current prototype leverages different OCR, text processing and information extraction techniques in order to provide both a highly accurate extracted text and rich metadata content (including automatically identified cataloguing metadata), overcoming typical limitations of current state of the art approaches. The initial tests provide promising results. The paper includes a discussion of future steps (e.g., AI-based techniques further leveraging the extracted data/metadata and making the system learn from user feedback) and of the many foreseen advantages of this research, both from a technical and a broader cultural-preservation and sharing point of view

Adaptive Algorithms for Automated Processing of Document Images

Large scale document digitization projects continue to motivate interesting document understanding technologies such as script and language identification, page classification, segmentation and enhancement. Typically, however, solutions are still limited to narrow domains or regular formats such as books, forms, articles or letters and operate best on clean documents scanned in a controlled environment. More general collections of heterogeneous documents challenge the basic assumptions of state-of-the-art technology regarding quality, script, content and layout. Our work explores the use of adaptive algorithms for the automated analysis of noisy and complex document collections. We first propose, implement and evaluate an adaptive clutter detection and removal technique for complex binary documents. Our distance transform based technique aims to remove irregular and independent unwanted foreground content while leaving text content untouched. The novelty of this approach is in its determination of best approximation to clutter-content boundary with text like structures. Second, we describe a page segmentation technique called Voronoi++ for complex layouts which builds upon the state-of-the-art method proposed by Kise [Kise1999]. Our approach does not assume structured text zones and is designed to handle multi-lingual text in both handwritten and printed form. Voronoi++ is a dynamically adaptive and contextually aware approach that considers components' separation features combined with Docstrum [O'Gorman1993] based angular and neighborhood features to form provisional zone hypotheses. These provisional zones are then verified based on the context built from local separation and high-level content features. Finally, our research proposes a generic model to segment and to recognize characters for any complex syllabic or non-syllabic script, using font-models. This concept is based on the fact that font files contain all the information necessary to render text and thus a model for how to decompose them. Instead of script-specific routines, this work is a step towards a generic character and recognition scheme for both Latin and non-Latin scripts