CAMIO: A Corpus for OCR in Multiple Languages.

CAMIO (Corpus of Annotated Multilingual Images for OCR) is a new corpus created by Linguistic Data Consortium to serve as a resource to support the development and evaluation of optical character recognition (OCR) and related technologies for 35 languages across 24 unique scripts. The corpus comprises nearly 70,000 images of machine printed text, covering a wide variety of topics and styles, document domains, attributes and scanning/capture artifacts. Most images have been exhaustively annotated for text localization, resulting in over 2.3M line-level bounding boxes. For 13 of the 35 languages, 1250 images/language have been further annotated with orthographic transcriptions of each line plus specification of reading order, yielding over 2.4M tokens of transcribed text. The resulting annotations are represented in a comprehensive XML output format defined for this corpus. The paper discusses corpus design and implementation, challenges encountered, baseline performance results obtained on the corpus for text localization and OCR decoding, and plans for corpus publication.