An efficient unsupervised approach for OCR error correction of Vietnamese OCR text

Abstract

Different types of OCR errors often occur in OCR texts due to the low quality of scanned document images or limitations in OCR software. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised approach for OCR error correction. Correction candidates for OCR errors are generated and explored in their neighborhoods using correction character edits controlled by an adapted hill-climbing algorithm. Correction characters are extracted from only original ground truth texts, which do not depend on OCR texts in training data. A weighted objective function used to score and rank correction candidates is heuristically tested to find optimal weight combinations. The proposed model is evaluated on an OCR text dataset originating from the Vietnamese handwritten database in the ICFHR 2018 Vietnamese online handwritten text recognition competition. The proposed model is also verified concerning its stability and complexity. The experimental results show that our model achieves competitive performance compared to the other models in the ICFHR 2018 competition.