Papers › UTRNet: High-Resolution Urdu Text Recognition In Printed Documents

UTRNet: High-Resolution Urdu Text Recognition In Printed Documents

27 Jun 2023arXiv:2306.15782archive 2025-07-28

Abdur Rahman, Arjun Ghosh, Chetan Arora

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the challenges of printed Urdu text recognition using high-resolution, multi-scale semantic feature extraction. Our proposed UTRNet architecture, a hybrid CNN-RNN model, demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. To address the limitations of previous works, which struggle to generalize to the intricacies of the Urdu script and the lack of sufficient annotated real-world data, we have introduced the UTRSet-Real, a large-scale annotated real-world dataset comprising over 11,000 lines and UTRSet-Synth, a synthetic dataset with 20,000 lines closely resembling real-world and made corrections to the ground truth of the existing IIITH dataset, making it a more reliable resource for future research. We also provide UrduDoc, a benchmark dataset for Urdu text line detection in scanned documents. Additionally, we have developed an online tool for end-to-end Urdu OCR from printed documents by integrating UTRNet with a text detection model. Our work not only addresses the current limitations of Urdu OCR but also paves the way for future research in this area and facilitates the continued advancement of Urdu OCR technology. The project page with source code, datasets, annotations, trained models, and online tool is available at abdur75648.github.io/UTRNet.

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Tasks

Line DetectionOptical Character Recognition (OCR)Printed Text RecognitionText Detection

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

UTRSet-RealUTRSet-SynthUrduDoc

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Text Detection UrduDoc ContourNet [69] Precision 86.99 #1 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Text Detection UrduDoc ContourNet [69] Recall 88.68 #1 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Text Detection UrduDoc DRRG [72] Precision 83.87 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Text Detection UrduDoc DRRG [72] Recall 84.72 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Text Detection UrduDoc PSENet [67] Precision 78.11 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Text Detection UrduDoc PSENet [67] Recall 77.91 #3 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Text Detection UrduDoc EAST [75] Precision 71.48 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Text Detection UrduDoc EAST [75] Recall 72.56 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Text Detection UrduDoc EAST Precision 70.43 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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