The difficulty of reliably extracting characters had delayed the character recognition solutions (or OCRs) in Indian languages. Contemporary research in Indian language text recognition has shifted towards recognizing text in word or line images without requiring sub-word segmentation, leveraging Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) for modeling unsegmented sequences. The next challenge is the lack of public data for all these languages. And there is an immediate need to lower the entry barrier for startups or solution providers. With this in mind, (i) we introduce Mozhi dataset, a novel public dataset comprising over 1.2 million annotated word images (equivalent to approximately 120 thousand text line images) across 13 languages. (ii) We conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis of various neural network models employing CTC across 13 Indian languages. (iii) We also provide APIs for our OCR models and web-based applications that integrate these APIs to digitize Indic printed documents. We compare our model’s performance with popular publicly available OCR tools for end-to-end document image recognition. Our model outperform these OCR engines on 8 out of 13 languages. The code, trained models, and dataset are available at  https://cvit.iiit.ac.in/usodi/tdocrmil.php .

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Towards Deployable OCR Models for Indic Languages

  • Minesh Mathew,
  • Ajoy Mondal,
  • C. V. Jawahar

摘要

The difficulty of reliably extracting characters had delayed the character recognition solutions (or OCRs) in Indian languages. Contemporary research in Indian language text recognition has shifted towards recognizing text in word or line images without requiring sub-word segmentation, leveraging Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) for modeling unsegmented sequences. The next challenge is the lack of public data for all these languages. And there is an immediate need to lower the entry barrier for startups or solution providers. With this in mind, (i) we introduce Mozhi dataset, a novel public dataset comprising over 1.2 million annotated word images (equivalent to approximately 120 thousand text line images) across 13 languages. (ii) We conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis of various neural network models employing CTC across 13 Indian languages. (iii) We also provide APIs for our OCR models and web-based applications that integrate these APIs to digitize Indic printed documents. We compare our model’s performance with popular publicly available OCR tools for end-to-end document image recognition. Our model outperform these OCR engines on 8 out of 13 languages. The code, trained models, and dataset are available at  https://cvit.iiit.ac.in/usodi/tdocrmil.php .