S M Jishanul Islam
2026
BornoDrishti: Leveraging Vision Encoders and Domain-Adaptive Learning for Bangla OCR on Diverse Documents
S M Jishanul Islam | Md Mehedi Hasan | Masbul Haider Ovi | Akm Shahariar Azad Rabby | Fuad Rahman
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
S M Jishanul Islam | Md Mehedi Hasan | Masbul Haider Ovi | Akm Shahariar Azad Rabby | Fuad Rahman
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
OCR for Bangla scripts remains a challenging problem, with existing solutions limited to single-domain processing. Current approaches lack a unified vision encoder that can understand diverse Bangla script variations, hindering practical deployment. We present BornoDrishti, the first unified OCR system based on the vision transformer that accurately recognizes both printed and handwritten Bangla scripts within a single model. Our approach introduces a novel domain objective that enables the model to learn domain-invariant representations while preserving script-specific features, eliminating the need for separate domain experts. BornoDrishti achieves competitive accuracy across both domains, setting state-of-the-art performance for printed scripts and demonstrating that a single unified model can match or exceed specialized uni-domain systems. We evaluate our model against state-of-the-art domain-specific and cross-domain OCR systems. This work establishes a foundation for advancing practical applications by using a unified multi-domain OCR system for complex Bangla scripts.