Can AI Save Centuries of Kurdish History?

This study tackles the challenge of digitizing fragile historical Kurdish publications, which current OCR systems fail to process due to damaged pages, non-standard fonts, and lack of datasets. Using Google’s open-source Tesseract 5.0, researchers built a custom dataset of over 1,200 annotated lines from pre-1950 Kurdish documents provided by the Zheen Center. The adapted Arabic model achieved promising accuracy (84% character recognition), and a user-friendly web app was developed for text extraction. The project highlights the need for larger public datasets and technical innovation to preserve low-resource languages like Kurdish.