A blackboard approach towards integrated Farsi OCR system

An integrated OCR system for Farsi text is proposed. The system uses information from several knowledge sources (KSs) and manages them in a blackboard approach. Some KSs like classifiers are acquired a priori through an offline training process while others like statistical features are extracted online while recognizing. An arbiter controls the interactions between the solution blackboard and KSs. The system has been tested on 20 real-life scanned documents with ten popular Farsi fonts and a recognition rate of 97.05% in word level and 99.03% in character level has been achieved. An erratum to this article can be found at