AraMS-28k is the largest publicly released line‑level dataset of genuine historical Arabic manuscripts, containing 14 books, 3,043 pages, and 28,600 annotated text lines (27,971 main‑text and 629 margin). The dataset spans three script traditions—Naskh, Ruq'ah, and Maghrebi—and includes a lithographed printed edition for format diversity. Each line is labeled as main‑text or margin, with margin lines that have a clear attachment point annotated with an insertion anchor to recover the manuscript’s true non‑linear reading order; both fully vocalized and diacritic‑normalized transcriptions are provided, and the data was produced via the RefLAM pipeline combining OCR, clean transcriptions, and human review.
"whyItMatters":"The dataset’s comprehensive line‑level annotations, including reading‑order anchors and dual transcription formats, enable reproducible research on Arabic manuscript recognition, layout analysis, and reading‑order recovery under a CC BY‑NC‑SA 4.0 license."
By Mohamed Guechaoui, Mohamed Diaa Zellagui, Souleyman Chaib, Sahraoui Dhelim
RefLAM is a pipeline that converts manuscript page images and clean transcriptions into validated, line-level ground truth for Arabic handwritten text recognition. It combines a deep‑learning page‑segmentation model, a multimodal large language model for structured OCR, and a diacritic‑agnostic fuzzy alignment engine that assigns a confidence score to each line, with a provable correctness guarantee for perfect scores. Using RefLAM, the authors achieved a 75× speedup over manual annotation and released AraMS‑28k, a dataset of 14 historical Arabic manuscripts with detailed annotations.
By Mohamed Guechaoui, Mohamed Diaa Zellagui, Souleyman Chaib, Sahraoui Dhelim
arXiv:2607. 08143v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present the results of HIPE-OCRepair-2026, an ICDAR competition on LLM-assisted OCR post-correction of historical documents.
By Maud Ehrmann, Emanuela Boros, Juri Opitz, Andrianos Michail, Florian Wagner, Simon Clematide
arXiv:2608.22316v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Whether an intermediate stage of modern Arabic handwriting helps or hurts historical Arabic HTR is usually decided from one implementation and one co...
By Sumaih Almarshad, Maram Alamri, Dona Aloraini, Fares Altuwaim, AlJawharh AlOtaibi, Reem Alyabis, Rayah Aldawsari
The paper explores how synthetic data can be used to train a Thai OCR model without real OCR labels. By systematically varying factors such as typeface diversity, page structure, and handwriting glyphs, the authors identify which aspects of realism most improve transfer to real documents. Using these insights, they adapt a large PaddleOCR model into Wayu‑Paxa‑OCR‑Zero, achieving a median character error rate of 1.24% on printed pages and 20.55% on handwriting, outperforming existing Thai OCR systems.
By Kunat Pipatanakul
Sinhala is a morphologically rich abugida spoken by roughly 16 million people in Sri Lanka, and to date, there are no publicly available real-world datasets for page-level Sinhala OCR. All previous studies for assessing Sinhala OCR models have used artificially generated data.
arXiv:2607. 20385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Persian remains substantially less mature than for Latin-script languages despite Persian being spoken by more than 110 million people across multiple countries.
By Pouria Mahdi, Haq Nawaz Malik
arXiv:2608. 19385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Historical Arabic manuscript transcription is not only a recognition problem.
By Abdullah Ahmed Ali, Mohammed Thamer Abdulhadi, Ali Haider Safaa, Dhulfiqar Mahdi Wadi
Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-based benchmarks and increasingly focused on text-rich understanding, but their robustness under controlled visual degradation remains insufficiently understood. This gap is critical for OCR reasoning, where visual corruption can induce OCR errors and structural distortions, thereby introducing uncertainty into the reasoning task.
arXiv:2607. 03650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting textual information from scanned medical documents, such as external laboratory reports and manually filled forms, has been a major challenge in modern electronic health records (EHRs).
By Enshuo Hsu, Jin Zhou, Kirk Roberts
Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly replacing traditional OCR for document understanding, but this study shows they often rewrite imperfect text into more plausible forms, a flaw that clean‑text OCR benchmarks miss. The authors created FaithC4, a multilingual perturbation benchmark of 1,455 single‑page documents with scramble, random substitution, and visually similar substitution attacks, and evaluated 15 systems across general‑purpose VLMs, OCR‑specialized VLMs, and traditional OCR pipelines. Results reveal that general‑purpose VLMs suffer up to 6.9 WER points under perturbation, OCR‑specialized VLMs 0.1–3.4 points, and traditional OCR less than 0.8 points on English; probing Qwen3‑VL‑4B shows rewriting occurs only when a perturbed word’s final‑layer representation remains close to the original, with short words (4–6 characters) rewritten up to 10% of the time.
whyItMatters":"The findings highlight a critical limitation of VLMs in document transcription, underscoring the need for robust evaluation benchmarks that capture rewriting behavior beyond clean‑text accuracy."
By Gwang Gook Lee, Kenan Emir Ak, Jay Mohta, Yan Xu, Dimitrios Dimitriadis
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