End-to-End Trainable Thai OCR System Using Hidden Markov Models

Abstract

In this paper we present an end-to-end trainable optical character recognition (OCR) system for recognizing machine-printed text in Thai documents. The end-to-end OCR system is based on a script-independent methodology using hidden Markov models. Our system provides an integrated workflow beginning with annotation and transcription of training images to performing OCR on new images with models trained on transcribed training images. The efficacy of our end-to-end OCR system is demonstrated by rapidly configuring our OCR engine for the Thai script. We present experimental results on Thai documents to highlight the specific challenges posed by the Thai script and analyze the recognition performance as a function of amount of training data.