When Do VLMs Help Arabic Manuscript OCR? A Cross-Dataset Study

2026-08-23

AI Summary

研究通过对比多种方法在不同阿拉伯文本数据集上的表现，探讨了视觉-语言模型在阿拉伯手稿OCR中的作用，并提出了一种基于OCR先验恢复原则的自适应工作流程。

Abstract

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly being used for document understanding, yet their role in Arabic and Islamic manuscript recognition remains underexplored. To address such a gap in this paper, we evaluate traditional OCR, general-purpose VLMs, Arabic-specialized VLMs, and OCR-conditioned VLM correction across eight Arabic text datasets spanning historical manuscripts, aged printed books, clean print, multi-domain documents, and handwriting. The results show that no single approach dominates across setups. On line-level historical manuscripts, VLMs are close to Tesseract; on page-level manuscript images, they perform better; and in several settings, an OCR-conditioned corrector improves over both standalone OCR and standalone VLMs. The central finding is an OCR-prior recoverability principle: OCR conditioning helps when the OCR output remains visually and textually recoverable, providing anchors that the VLM can refine against the image. It improves recognition on aged print, clean print, mixed-domain Arabic, and some Naskh manuscripts, but degrades performance when the prior is script-mismatched or systematically misleading, as in Maghribi manuscripts and realistic student handwriting. Additional diagnostics show that Arabic VLM-OCR is sensitive to diacritics, preprocessing, generation budget, and repetition loops. These findings support an adaptive OCR-VLM workflow that routes pages according to script, OCR-prior recoverability, length diagnostics, and failure-mode indicators.

Problem

• VLMs
• Arabic Manuscript OCR
• Cross-Dataset Study
• OCR Conditioning
• Recoverability Principle

Innovation

• OCR-conditioned VLM correction
• Arabic manuscript recognition
• OCR-prior recoverability principle