OCR, Optical Character Recognition, Sakhr Arabic, Arabization,Software localization, Arabic Translation, technical translation, Software

ocrpho.jpg (10515 bytes)

Introduction

Sakhr Automatic Reader is the outcome of Sakhr ongoing research in the fields of Arabic Natural Language Processing and Character Recognition technologies. Sakhr Automatic Reader pioneers the OCR programs in Arabic language. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. When a text document is scanned, the computer recognizes this text as a graphical image. The user cannot manipulate, search, or edit the image text in its image format. An OCR program reads this scanned text, recognizes it, and then converts the figures and characters into editable text pieces.

Sakhr Automatic Reader transforms scanned images into a grid of millions of dots, optically recognizes the characters found in them and ultimately converts them into text. The complex nature of the Arabic language is evident in the cursives of the text, character overlapping, various character shapes, diacritics and the variety of calligraphic Arabic fonts that exist. As a result, these specific Arabic language complexities present major technical challenges in the Arabic OCR industry. The Automatic Reader, backed by Sakhr extensive experience in Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, addresses these challenges effectively, thus providing Arabic users with an award-winning and high quality OCR solution.

Automatic Reader Features

The following tables summarize the Automatic Reader features categorized as General Features, Image Processing & Recognition Features, and Technical & Integration Specifications.

Available in two new versions
OCR Gold Edition - OCR Platinum Edition

General Features

No.	Feature	Description
1	Performance and Accuracy	-1 2400 characters per second on PIV-based computers, 2.0 GHz, and 4000 characters per second on Core2 2.13 GHz processor. -2 Up to 99%accuracy in recognizing Arabic books, newspapers, and similar quality scanned documents.
2	Languages Supported	Recognizing: -3 The main Arabic based characters languages: Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Jawi, Pashto (Urdu, Jawi, and Pashto come in an extra language pack). -4 As well as 18 other international languages (as it includes the most powerful Latin OCR engine – ScanSoft): English, French, German, Dutch, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
3	Language Pair Supported	-5 Recognizing bilingual documents: Arabic/English, Arabic/French, and Farsi/English. -6 Including a bilingual spellchecker (Arabic/English).
4	Recognition Technologies	Supporting OMNI and Learning technologies to obtain higher accuracy in different fonts.
5	Supported Input Formats	-7 Dealing with all image formats (.BMP, .TIFF, .JPEG, .PCX etc.) -8 Supporting also PDF format; which is needed especially with Document and Content Management Systems.
	Fax Support	Supporting standard fax documents.
6	Supported Output Formats	Saving the output text in different formats such as .txt, .rtf, .XML, .HTML and searchable *.PDF.
7	Supported Scanners	Working with any type of scanner supporting Twain protocol.
8	Send E-Mails	User has the ability to send OCR results by e-mail.
9	Interface	A very convenient intuitive bilingual (English/Arabic) interface and easy to use. It allows even inexperienced users to navigate and perform the program functions easily and quickly.
10	Help	Comprehensive help is provided in both Arabic and English.

Image Processing and Recognition Features

To increase the recognition accuracy of fax documents and image files, Sakhr Automatic Reader is backed up with the following unique features:

No.	Feature	Description
1	Powerful Imaging Enhancement Tools	Supporting automatic and manual image rotation and fixing, deskewing image, removing shading, zooming, smoothing and inverting colors if the image background is black and its foreground is white.
2	Diacritics	Recognizing or skipping diacritics in Arabic images.
3	Preserving Document Layout	Recognizing and supporting tables (with a special support for ill-formed tables), column, pictures, page size detection, and paragraph indentation in scanned images.
4	Frames Support	-9 Supporting automatic framing and manual framing modes, saving frames in files and applying the saved frames as templates. -10 Supporting non rectangular frames. -11 Supporting adding custom attributes for each frame to gain more control on recognition accuracy.
5	Arabic Language Morphological Support	Sakhr NLP technologies for Arabic Language are used to correct the recognition results (like Morphological Analyzer, Morphological Syntax, Statistical Language Pattern, Arabic Thesaurus and other NLP technologies to enhance OCR results). Also the program includes Sakhr corrector as well as an English spellchecker. This is a unique feature in Arabic OCR field which makes Sakhr OCR accuracy incomparable.
6	Batch Operations	Supporting 4 different types of batch operations: -12 Scan & Save -13 Scan & Recognize -14 Load & Recognize -15 Scan & Save, then Load & Recognize
7	Program Operating Modes	Working as a standalone application with an interactive interface, and can be integrated with other applications via its SDK, available only with Platinum version.

Technical and Integration Specifications

No.	Feature/Spec.	Description
1	Package/Protection	Sakhr OCR currently comes in two versions both protected by WIBU dongle, - Gold edition, runs on either client or server machines but the concurrent OCR sessions is limited to only two sessions. - Platinum edition, bundling also the OCR SDK. When running on client Windows, only two concurrent OCR sessions can be carried out, while if running on Server Windows there is no limitation on running sessions. It worth to mention that running on server Windows will require the OCR server licensing.

System Requirements

Item	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	Pentium IV 700 MHz	Core2 2.13 GHz processor or higher
Free Disk Space	620 MB	650 MB or higher
RAM	256 MB	1GB or higher
Operating System For Desktop edition	Windows XP SP2, Vista and windows 7 (Arabic-Enabled)	Windows XP SP2, Vista and windows 7 (Arabic-Enabled)
Operating System For Server edition	Windows, and windows (32 / 64 bit)(Arabic-Enabled)	Windows, and windows (32 / 64 bit)(Arabic-Enabled)

The Best Arabic OCR Technology