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
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
arXiv:2608.22366v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly being used for document understanding, yet their role in Arabic and Islamic manuscript recognition remai...
By Moshiur Farazi, Firoj Alam, Abderrahmane Maaradji, Zakaria Maamar, Hamdy Mubarak, Wajdi Zaghouani
arXiv:2609.37755v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Purpose: Most Greek papyri remain unpublished and undigitised; a handwritten text recognition (HTR) pipeline that transcribes them automatically would...
By Anton Repushko, Elena Chepel
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: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