Optimizing OCR Accuracy for
Bi-tonal, Noisy Scans of Degraded Arabic Documents
February 2005
Paul Herceg, The MITRE Corporation
Ben Huyck, The MITRE Corporation
Chris Johnson, The MITRE Corporation
Amlan Kundu, The MITRE Corporation
Linda Van Guilder, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
Acquiring foreign language from degraded hardcopy documents is of interest
to military and border control applications. Bi-tonal image scans are
desirable because file size is small. However, the nature of hardcopy
degradations and the scanner or image enhancement software capabilities
used directly affect the quality of the captured image and the extent
of language acquisition. We applied a collection of manual treatments
to hardcopy Arabic documents to develop a corpus of bi-tonal images.
We then used this corpus in an exploratory study to derive conclusions
about how bi-tonal images could be enhanced. This paper discusses the
manually degraded Arabic document corpus, the image enhancement study,
and the significant optical character recognition (OCR) improvements
obtained with simple scanner driver adjustments.
Publication
Copyright © 2005 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. This paper was published in the Proceedings of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) Vol. 5817, Visual Information Processing XIV, May 2005, pp. 179-187, and is made available as an electronic reprint with permission of SPIE. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic or multiple reproduction, distribution to multiple locations via electronic or other means, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited.
Additional Search Keywords
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