HICMA: The Handwriting Identification for Calligraphy and Manuscripts in Arabic Dataset

Anis Ismail, Zena Kamel, Reem Mahmoud


Abstract
Arabic is one of the most globally spoken languages with more than 313 million speakers worldwide. Arabic handwriting is known for its cursive nature and the variety of writing styles used. Despite the increase in effort to digitize artistic and historical elements, no public dataset was released to deal with Arabic text recognition for realistic manuscripts and calligraphic text. We present the Handwriting Identification of Manuscripts and Calligraphy in Arabic (HICMA) dataset as the first publicly available dataset with real-world and diverse samples of Arabic handwritten text in manuscripts and calligraphy. With more than 5,000 images across five different styles, the HICMA dataset includes image-text pairs and style labels for all images. We further present a comparison of the current state-of-the-art optical character recognition models in Arabic and benchmark their performance on the HICMA dataset, which serves as a baseline for future works. Both the HICMA dataset and its benchmarking tool are made available to the public under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license in the hope that the presented work opens the door to further enhancements of complex Arabic text recognition.
Anthology ID:
2023.arabicnlp-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore (Hybrid)
Editors:
Hassan Sawaf, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Wajdi Zaghouani, Walid Magdy, Ahmed Abdelali, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Nizar Habash, Salam Khalifa, Amr Keleg, Hatem Haddad, Imed Zitouni, Khalil Mrini, Rawan Almatham
Venues:
ArabicNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
24–32
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.arabicnlp-1.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anis Ismail, Zena Kamel, and Reem Mahmoud. 2023. HICMA: The Handwriting Identification for Calligraphy and Manuscripts in Arabic Dataset. In Proceedings of ArabicNLP 2023, pages 24–32, Singapore (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HICMA: The Handwriting Identification for Calligraphy and Manuscripts in Arabic Dataset (Ismail et al., ArabicNLP-WS 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.3.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.arabicnlp-1.3.mp4