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An End-to-End OCR System for Pashto Cursive Script

  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system plays an important role in digitization of data acquired as images from a variety of sources. Although the area is very well explored for Latin languages, some of the languages based on Arabic cursive script are not yet explored. It is due to many factors: Most importantly are the unavailability of proper data sets and complexities posed by cursive scripts. The Pashto language is one of such languages which needs considerable exploration towards OCR. In order to develop such an OCR system, this thesis provides a pioneering study that explores deep learning for the Pashto language in the field of OCR. The Pashto language is spoken by more than $50$ million people across the world, and it is an active medium both for oral as well as written communication. It is associated with rich literary heritage and contains huge written collection. These written materials present contents of simple to complex nature, and layouts from hand-scribed to printed text. The Pashto language presents mainly two types of complexities (i) generic w.r.t. cursive script, (ii) specific w.r.t. Pashto language. Generic complexities are cursiveness, context dependency, and breaker character anomalies, as well as space anomalies. Pashto specific complexities are variations in shape for a single character and shape similarity for some of the additional Pashto characters. Existing research in the area of Arabic OCR did not lead to an end-to-end solution for the mentioned complexities and therefore could not be generalized to build a sophisticated OCR system for Pashto. The contribution of this thesis spans in three levels, conceptual level, data level, and practical level. In the conceptual level, we have deeply explored the Pashto language and identified those characters, which are responsible for the challenges mentioned above. In the data level, a comprehensive dataset is introduced containing real images of hand-scribed contents. The dataset is manually transcribed and has the most frequent layout patterns associated with the Pashto language. The practical level contribution provides a bridge, in the form of a complete Pashto OCR system, and connects the outcomes of the conceptual and data levels contributions. The practical contribution comprises of skew detection, text-line segmentation, feature extraction, classification, and post-processing. The OCR module is more strengthened by using deep learning paradigm to recognize Pashto cursive script by the framework of Recursive Neural Networks (RNN). Proposed Pashto text recognition is based on Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM) and realizes a character recognition rate of $90.78\%$ on Pashto real hand-scribed images. All these contributions are integrated into an application to provide a flexible and generic End-to-End Pashto OCR system. The impact of this thesis is not only specific to the Pashto language, but it is also beneficial to other cursive languages like Arabic, Urdu, and Persian e.t.c. The main reason is the Pashto character set, which is a superset of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu languages. Therefore, the conceptual contribution of this thesis provides insight and proposes solutions to almost all generic complexities associated with Arabic, Persian, and Urdu languages. For example, an anomaly caused by breaker characters is deeply analyzed, which is shared among 70 languages, mainly use Arabic script. This thesis presents a solution to this issue and is equally beneficial to almost all Arabic like languages. The scope of this thesis has two important aspects. First, a social impact, i.e., how a society may benefit from it. The main advantages are to bring the historical and almost vanished document to life and to ensure the opportunities to explore, analyze, translate, share, and understand the contents of Pashto language globally. Second, the advancement and exploration of the technical aspects. Because, this thesis empirically explores the recognition and challenges which are solely related to the Pashto language, both regarding character-set and the materials which present such complexities. Furthermore, the conceptual and practical background of this thesis regarding complexities of Pashto language is very beneficial regarding OCR for other cursive languages.
Metadaten
Author:Riaz Ahmad
URN:urn:nbn:de:hbz:386-kluedo-52850
Advisor:Andreas Dengel
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language of publication:English
Date of Publication (online):2018/05/31
Year of first Publication:2018
Publishing Institution:Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
Granting Institution:Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
Acceptance Date of the Thesis:2018/03/20
Date of the Publication (Server):2018/06/04
Page Number:181
Faculties / Organisational entities:Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Informatik
DDC-Cassification:0 Allgemeines, Informatik, Informationswissenschaft / 000 Allgemeines, Wissenschaft
Licence (German):Creative Commons 4.0 - Namensnennung (CC BY 4.0)