Can AI Finally Crack Ottoman Text Recognition?

This article reviews research on OCR for machine-typed historical documents, with a focus on Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman scripts. While no system can yet accurately extract text from old Kurdish publications in Arabic-Persian script, related studies show progress through neural networks, SVMs, and deep learning. From early models with limited accuracy to modern convolutional networks achieving near 98% recognition, the literature highlights both the challenges of cursive scripts and the potential of AI-driven approaches for digitizing heritage texts.