arXiv Computation and Language

Towards a Joint Khmer Text Recognition and Word Segmentation

The paper introduces a unified model that jointly performs Khmer text recognition and word segmentation, eliminating the need for a separate segmentation step. Using a connectionist-temporal-classification decoder, the model can be instructed to output Khmer text with or without word boundaries. Experiments across document, scene, and handwritten image datasets demonstrate that the model accurately recognizes characters and locates word boundaries, reducing error and latency compared to traditional sequential pipelines.

arXiv AI
Aug 12

TongGuOCR: A Layout-Aware and Token-Augmented OCR MLLM for Chinese Historical Documents

arXiv:2608. 07917v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chinese historical documents preserve valuable cultural heritage, but many collections remain accessible only as scanned page images, preventing full-text retrieval, collation, and computational analysis.

By Zhongheng Zhou, Yi Sun, Huiguo He, Yuyi Zhang, Peirong Zhang, Yulin Fang, Dezhi Peng, Minghui Liao, Lianwen Jin
arXiv AI
Aug 11

TongGuOCR: A Layout-Aware and Token-Augmented OCR Framework for Chinese Historical Documents

arXiv:2608. 07917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chinese historical documents preserve valuable cultural heritage, but many collections remain accessible only as scanned page images, preventing full-text retrieval, collation, and computational analysis.

By Zhongheng Zhou, Yi Sun, Huiguo He, Yuyi Zhang, Peirong Zhang, Yulin Fang, Dezhi Peng, Minghui Liao, Lianwen Jin
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Ancient-Bench: A Comprehensive Multi-millennial, Multi-medium, and Multi-script Benchmark for Ancient Chinese Artifact Text Recognition

Ancient-Bench is a new benchmark for recognizing text on ancient Chinese artifacts, comprising 2,700 images that span 3,000 years of character evolution, nine artifact categories, and seven historical script forms. It introduces three annotation standards—symbol, character, and parsing standardization—to accommodate medium‑specific characteristics and enable consistent evaluation. Experiments show that current Vision‑Language Models and OCR specialists still struggle with variant characters, specialized symbols, and hallucination, indicating the task remains largely unsolved.

By Hiuyi Cheng, Nuo Xu, Yuyi Zhang, Xuhan Zheng, Wei Pan, Jing Zhang, Dezhi Peng, Minghui Liao, Yihua Teng, Jihao Wu, Haoyu Ren, Lianwen Jin
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Can Scene Text Recognition Read Rare Compositions?

The paper reports that scene text recognition models, while achieving 89–97% accuracy on standard benchmarks, perform significantly worse on rare word–trigram combinations, with a 10–18 point drop in accuracy at the rare‑word/rare‑trigram corner across multiple languages and models. Scaling the vision backbone improves overall accuracy but does not alleviate this corner‑specific deficit. The authors identify the autoregressive decoder’s lexical prior as the root cause and show that architectural changes—specifically moving from autoregressive to CTC decoding—yield the largest improvement for these rare compositions.

By Genpei Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Synth-JDoc: Synthesizing a Japanese Document Image Dataset for OCR with Diverse Layouts and Embedded Images

The paper introduces Synth-JDoc, a synthetic Japanese document image dataset created by rendering text with HTML and CSS to produce multi‑column layouts that include both vertical and horizontal writing styles. Images generated by text‑to‑image models are embedded to enhance visual realism, and noise and degradation filters are applied to improve robustness. Experiments show that fine‑tuning Large Vision Language Models on Synth‑JDoc yields superior performance on reading vertically written Japanese text compared to prior synthetic datasets.

By Keito Sasagawa, Shuhei Kurita, Daisuke Kawahara