# A Survey of OCR in Arabic Language: Applications, Techniques, and Challenges
## 2 Datasets
### Handwritten Text  
Urdu and Arabic have many similarities. Writing styles are identical, and both have cursive nature as well; both start from right to left, and Urdu has about 39 to 40 letters; Arabic is similar to Urdu but has fewer characters. Urdu borrows a large vocabulary from Arabic (almost 30%). Most Urdu speakers can read Quran because of Urdu and Arabic similarities. Thus, their datasets and trained models are commonly used as well. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l} \hline \hline
**Dataset** & **Type of Content** & **Availability** & **Size of Dataset** \\ \hline ACTIV2 [12] & Embedded words & Public & 10,415 text images \\ QTID [13] & Synthetic words & Private & 309,720 words and 249,428 characters \\ IFN/ENIT [14] & Handwritten words & Public & 115,000 words and 212,000 characters \\ AHDB [15] & Handwritten words and digits & Private & 30,000 words \\ APTTI [16] & Printed words & Public & 113,284 words and 648,280 characters \\ HACDB [17] & Handwritten characters & Public & 6600 characters and 50 writers \\ UPTTI [18] & Printed text lines & Public & 10,000 text lines \\ Digital Jawi [19] & Jawi paleography images & Public & 168 words and 1524 characters \\ KHATT [20] & Handwritten text lines & Public & 9327 lines, 165,890 words and 589,924 characters \\ ALIF [21] & Embedded text lines & Upon request & 1804 words and 89,819 characters \\ ACTIV [22] & Embedded text lines & Public & 4824 lines and 21,520 words \\ SmartATID [23] & Printed and handwritten pages & Public & 9088 pages \\ Degraded historical [24] & Handwritten documents & Public & 10 handwritten images and 10 printed images \\ Printed PAW [25] & Printed subwords & Upon request & 415,280 unique words and 550,000 sub words \\ Checks [26] & Handwritten subwords and digits & Private & 29,498 subwords and 15,148 digits \\ Numeral [27] & Handwritten digits & Public & 21,120 digits and 44 writers \\ Forms [28] & Handwritten characters & Private & 15,800 characters and 500 writers \\ KAFD [29] & Printed pages and lines & Public & 28,767 pages and 644,006 lines \\ AHDBIFTR [30] & Handwritten images & Public & 497 word images and 5 writers \\ ARABASE [31] & Handwritten text & Public & 47,000 words and 500 free Arabic sentences \\ CEDAR [32] & Handwritten pages & Private & 20,000 words, 10 writers, and 100 documents \\ CENPARMI [26] & Handwritten subwords and digits & Public & 6000 digit images \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Available datasets with their stats, dataset type, and mode of availability. Figure 2: Brief overview of OCR process. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [33] surveyed automatic Urdu text recognition techniques and described the algorithms, techniques, datasets, challenges, and future directions for Urdu OCR. Additionally, [34] reviewed the availability of datasets and suggested more training data to address the unique challenges of OCR systems. Due to their similarities, both languages have some datasets available. The authors of [35] presented a dataset of handwritten Urdu numerals. In [11], the authors proposed an Urdu Nastaliq Handwritten Dataset (UNHD), which is written by 500 writers on A4-size paper and is available on request ([[https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/drsaadbinahmed/unhd-dataset](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/drsaadbinahmed/unhd-dataset)]([https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/drsaadbinahmed/unhd-dataset](https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/drsaadbinahmed/unhd-dataset)), accessed on 28 March 2023). [PERSON] et al. [36] also presented a Persian language dataset; this dataset is collected from different Persian-language new websites, and the description of the dataset is shown in Table 2; this dataset is split into 80% for training and 20% for testing purpose. There are some datasets available that are used for handwritten text recognition of Urdu, and, as we know, Urdu and Arabic use the same vocabulary and alphabet as well. Therefore, we can use Urdu datasets as well and achieve good results. For this purpose, ref.