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 Open Source Arabic OCR software

Actually (2007-08-27) The principal GPL OCR active utilities (OCRAD, GOCR, OCRE) doesn't support arabic printed text recognition. ClaraOCR project seems to be inactive, but its documentation promises to work well with any horitzontal-writing language.

Siragi-OCR

SIRAGI is an open source software designed to help blind and partially sighted people working with their computer. Visually impaired people can use this program to "listen" the content of their screen under windows or Linux/KDE. The main advantage of using SIRAGI is the support of arabic language for braille language and for speech synthesis in arabic.

As a part of This, Siragi's developer started devoloping a FOSS OCR that should support Arabic.

Siragi's Arabeyes Page

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 - High-performance Optical Character Recognition and image enhancement for Arabic-based scripts, including Farsi, Pashto, Urdu and Arabic OCR.

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/