Manchu, now critically endangered, was one of the principal languages of the Qing empire (1636-1912), and its extensive archival record is increasingly digitized but remains difficult to search and an...
arXiv:2604. 00725v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end OCR for historical newspapers remains challenging, as models must handle long text sequences, degraded print quality, and complex layouts.
By Merveilles Agbeti-Messan, Pierrick Tranouez, St\'ephane Nicolas, Cl\'ement Chatelain, Thierry Paquet
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
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: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Abstract: We present the results of HIPE-OCRepair-2026, an ICDAR competition on LLM-assisted OCR post-correction of historical documents.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:2607. 03994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern language models generally represent text as sequences of discrete token embeddings, an assumption deeply rooted in current practice but rarely questioned.
By Shuyang Xiang, Hao Guan