A deep learning model for Ottoman OCR

The Ottoman OCR is an open problem because the OCR models for Arabic do not perform well on Ottoman. The models specifically trained with Ottoman documents have not produced satisfactory results either. We present a deep learning model and an OCR tool using that model for the OCR of printed Ottoman documents in the naksh font. We propose an end-to-end trainable CRNN architecture consisting of CNN, RNN (LSTM), and CTC layers for the Ottoman OCR problem. An experimental comparison of this model, called , with the Tesseract Arabic, the Tesseract Persian, Abby Finereader, Miletos, and Google Docs OCR tools or models was performed using a test data set of 21 pages of original documents. With 88.86% raw text, 96.12% normalized text, and 97.37% joined text character recognition accuracy, the Hybrid model outperforms the others with a marked difference. Our model outperforms the next best model by a clear margin of 4% which is a significant improvement considering the difficulty of the Ottoman OCR problem, and the huge size of the Ottoman archives to be processed. The hybrid model also achieves 58% word recognition accuracy on normalized text which is the only rate above 50%.