Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a key technology enabling access to digital text data. This technique is especially valuable for Arabic scripts, for which there has been very little digital access.

Arabic script is widely used today. It is estimated that approximately 200 million people use Arabic as a first language, and the Arabic script is shared by an additional 13 languages, making it the second most widespread script in the world. However, Arabic scripts pose unique challenges for OCR systems that cannot be simply adapted from existing Latin character-based processing...