bbOCR: An Open-source Multi-domain OCR Pipeline for Bengali Documents
Abstract
Despite the existence of numerous Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools, the lack of comprehensive open-source systems hampers the progress of document digitization in various low-resource languages, including Bengali. Low-resource languages, especially those with an alphasyllabary writing system, suffer from the lack of large-scale datasets for various document OCR components such as word-level OCR, document layout extraction, and distortion correction; which are available as individual modules in high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce Bengali$.$AI-BRACU-OCR (bbOCR): an open-source scalable document OCR system that can reconstruct Bengali documents into a structured searchable digitized format that leverages a novel Bengali text recognition model and two novel synthetic datasets. We present extensive component-level and system-level evaluation: both use a novel diversified evaluation dataset and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Our extensive evaluation suggests that our proposed solution is preferable over the current state-of-the-art Bengali OCR systems. The source codes and datasets are available here: https://bengaliai.github.io/bbocr.
- Publication:
-
arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- August 2023
- DOI:
- 10.48550/arXiv.2308.10647
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2308.10647
- Bibcode:
- 2023arXiv230810647Z
- Keywords:
-
- Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition