MuSTEL: A Large-Scale Multilingual Synthetic Text-Line Image Dataset for OCR
Read the original on arXiv Computer Vision →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computer Vision.
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.
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.
arXiv:2605. 16409v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optical character recognition (OCR) and multilingual scene-text understanding remain challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in real-world images containing small or degraded text, cluttered layouts, occlusion, handwriting, and complex typography.
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.
UniLipi is a unified multi‑script OCR model trained on 13 Indic scripts to recognize handwritten manuscripts under challenging conditions such as varied line geometry, length, and interruptions by non‑textual elements. It uses script‑aware synthetic data generation to perform well even with limited real annotated data. The model also predicts script identity and per‑line character counts, aiding manuscript cataloging, and its representations transfer to contemporary Indic handwriting and several non‑Indic scripts.
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.