This systematic literature review examines 97 studies on optical character recognition (OCR) from 2015 to 2025, tracing the evolution of AI models, application domains, data types, and linguistic coverage. It identifies key OCR models, evaluates their performance, strengths, and limitations, and highlights unresolved challenges such as limited resources for underrepresented languages, high variability in handwritten text, and constraints in real‑time applications. The review proposes promising approaches—including self‑supervised learning, multimodal AI, AutoML, AI‑assisted postprocessing, TinyML, and joint corpora creation—to enhance OCR accuracy and address these challenges for industrial use.
By Nuzhat Khan, Ab Al-Hadi Ab Rahman, Shahriyar Masud Rizvi, Ibrahim Yousef Alshareef, Muhammad Nadzir Marsono, Muhammad Paend Bakht, Mohd Shahrizal Rusli, Shahidatul Sadiah
arXiv:2610.01134v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: An optical character recognition (OCR) can scan a paper and extract text using technology, making people's jobs easier. While various OCR systems are a...
By Faias Satter, Sk. Md. Masudul Ahsan
arXiv:2608. 07917v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chinese historical documents preserve valuable cultural heritage, but many collections remain accessible only as scanned page images, preventing full-text retrieval, collation, and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
License Plate Recognition (LPR) systems are critical tools in traffic monitoring, security enforcement, and urban mobility management. Traditional LPR systems often rely on a multi-stage pipeline involving object detection using You Only Look Once (YOLO) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which suffer from limitations such as high resource demands, poor performance in unstructured environments, and the need for large annotated datasets.
arXiv:2608. 07917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chinese historical documents preserve valuable cultural heritage, but many collections remain accessible only as scanned page images, preventing full-text retrieval, collation, and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
The paper evaluates open-source OCR, LLM, and VLM systems on a high‑risk public sector task: extracting structured data from student application documents. Results show that VLMs generally outperform OCR+LLM pipelines, yet only 4 of 35 configurations achieve F1 scores above 0.5, with most combinations scoring below 0.25. Model size and input quality, especially preserving OCR structure, are critical factors influencing performance.
By Elias Schubert, Felix Bie{\ss}mann