When Do VLMs Help Arabic Manuscript OCR? A Cross-Dataset Study
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 correcto...
| Authors | Moshiur Farazi, Firoj Alam, Abderrahmane Maaradji et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 23 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 August 2026 |
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