Re: Arabic OCR

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 15:41, Ossama Khayat wrote:
> > 
> > Topic: A paper that "introduces a statistical approch
> > for the recognition of Arabic caracters".
> > - http://www.ici.ro/ici/revista/sic2001_3/art4.html
> > 
> > Topic: Some softwares from SA
> > - http://ceri.kacst.edu.sa/webpage/software_a_3.htm
> > 
> > Topic: How to encode image produced by a recognition system?
> > - http://lists.arabeyes.org/archives/general/2002/March/msg00001.html
> > 
> > Topic: Graph based segmentation
> > - http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~elgammal/pub/ACR_ICDAR01_final.pdf
>
> While the links will be very useful to get the ball running,
> I believe the scientific/academic status is even more advanced
> than this. This actually translates to me to there is *no* Arabic
> open source OCR. Better to use existing OCR. Is gOCR active? From
> some googling there is Clara OCR and ocrad (gnu ocr).
>
> Any body knows anything about that?

Here are some of the links I found - mind you I didn't sift
through them fully, but I think there is enough info there
for a concentrated start.  I will contact various academics
(I'll CC the list of course) to see what they have to say
(if their emails don't bounce back that is).

One of the URLs noted below also lists the various Open Source
OCR projects (GOCR and ClaraOCR are both actively maintained
and we should contact their developers and all projects to see
if they are open to including Arabic support given our help).

List of Linux OCR applications:
 - http://www.linux-ocr.ekitap.gen.tr

Various Research Papers/Sites (Arabic related):
 - http://tides.umiacs.umd.edu/description.html
 - http://www.bmva.ac.uk/bmvc/1999/papers/42.pdf
 - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=505744&dl=ACM&coll=GUIDE
 - http://www.hf.uib.no/smi/ksv/arabocr.html
 - http://www.hf.uio.no/east/sibawayhi/HomePage

Hope that's enough to get started.

Salam.

 - Nadim


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