Optical Character Recognition

OCR is the ability to scan a document (or grab a PDF file) and run an OCR program on it and it will generate, based on optical recognition and approximation, an editable text file. For an idea about OCR see http://www.students.cs.uu.nl/people/mjkammer/Work/intro_2_OCR.html

Current Status of Arabic OCR software

I (MuhammadAlkarouri) know of no actually working Arabic OCR software that is open source. Any additions are certainly welcome.

Resources

• List of Linux OCR applications
• OCR from Wikipedia

Arabic OCR Links

Papers

• Automatic Recognition Using Zernike Moments As A Feature Extractor (Paper)
• Graph Based Segmentation .. (Paper)
• Structural Features Of Cursive Arabic Scripts (Paper)
• Multilingual Machine Printed OCR (Paper)
• Test of two Arabic OCR programs
• Performance Evaluation of two Arabic OCR products

Software

• Readiris - Supports Arabic and Persian
• NovoDynamics VERUS - Focuses on high-performance OCR and image enhancement for Arabic-based scripts, including Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Urdu.

FOSS "no Arabic support yet"

• Tesseract is an open source OCR, initially developed by HP, and released under the Apache License.
• OOCR OOCR is an OCR program still in development, under the GPL.
• GOCR - included in Debian and other distributions.
• GNU Ocrad "is an OCR [...] program based on a feature extraction method".

Other Links

• How to encode image produced by a recognition system (mailing thread) http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/general/2002/March/msg00001.html
• Rapidly Retargetable Translingual Detection http://tides.umiacs.umd.edu/description.html
• Sibawayhi Project http://www.hf.uio.no/east/sibawayhi/HomePage/