ADOCRNet: A Deep Learning OCR for Arabic Documents Recognition

Abstract

In recent years, Optical character recognition (OCR) has experienced a resurgence of interest especially for contemporary Arabic data. In fact, OCR development for printed and handwritten Arabic script is still a challenging task. These challenges are due to the specific characteristics of the Arabic script. In this work, we attempt to address these challenges by creating a deep learning OCR for Arabic document recognition called ADOCRNet. It is a novel deep learning framework whose architecture is built of layers of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) trained by the so-called Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) algorithm. In order to assess the performance of our OCR, the proposed system is performed on two printed text datasets which are P-KHATT (text line images) and APTI (word images). It’s also evaluated on a handwritten Arabic text dataset IFN/ENIT (word images). According to the practical tests, the conceived model achieves strength recognition rates on the three datasets. ADOCRNet reaches a Character Error Rate (CER) of 0.01% on the P-KHATT dataset, 0.03% on the APTI dataset and a Word Error Rate (WER) of 1.09% on the IFN/ENIT dataset, which considerably outperforms the outcomes of the current systems.