Invizo: Arabic Handwritten Document Optical Character Recognition Solution
This solution addresses the problem of Arabic handwritten document recognition, which is significant for individuals and organizations dealing with Arabic documents, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, by providing a practical and useful tool for real-life OCR tasks.
The authors tackled the problem of Arabic handwritten document optical character recognition, achieving 81.66% precision and 79.07% F-measure on a text detection task, with character error rates of 0.59% and 7.91% on printed and handwritten texts respectively. The proposed solution yields strong performances on both printed and handwritten texts, with word error rates of 1.72% and 31.41%.
Converting images of Arabic text into plain text is a widely researched topic in academia and industry. However, recognition of Arabic handwritten and printed text presents difficult challenges due to the complex nature of variations of the Arabic script. This work proposes an end-to-end solution for recognizing Arabic handwritten, printed, and Arabic numbers and presents the data in a structured manner. We reached 81.66% precision, 78.82% Recall, and 79.07% F-measure on a Text Detection task that powers the proposed solution. The proposed recognition model incorporates state-of-the-art CNN-based feature extraction, and Transformer-based sequence modeling to accommodate variations in handwriting styles, stroke thicknesses, alignments, and noise conditions. The evaluation of the model suggests its strong performances on both printed and handwritten texts, yielding 0.59% CER and & 1.72% WER on printed text, and 7.91% CER and 31.41% WER on handwritten text. The overall proposed solution has proven to be relied on in real-life OCR tasks. Equipped with both detection and recognition models as well as other Feature Extraction and Matching helping algorithms. With the general purpose implementation, making the solution valid for any given document or receipt that is Arabic handwritten or printed. Thus, it is practical and useful for any given context.