# Alef-OCR-Image2Html

An Arabic OCR model that transforms document images,including historical texts, scanned pages, and handwritten materials—into structured and semantic HTML.

### Key Features

- **Semantic HTML Output:** Generates structured HTML with semantic tags (section, header, main, footer, table, etc.)
- **Multi-format Support:** Handles various document types including historical manuscripts, newspaper articles, scientific papers, invoices, and more
- **Arabic-Optimized:** Fine-tuned specifically for Arabic text recognition and structure extraction
- **Zero-cost Training:** Developed using Kaggle's free tier computational resources

## Model Architecture

- **Base Model:** Qwen2.5-VL-Instruct
- **Fine-tuning Method:** QLoRA with 4-bit quantization
- **LoRA Configuration:** Rank 16 applied to all modules
- **Optimization:** Unsloth for memory efficiency and training speed

## Training Data

The model was trained on a custom dataset of **28K image-HTML pairs** consisting of:

- **46% Web-scraped content** (~13K samples): Arabic Wikipedia articles with cleaned semantic HTML
- **54% Synthetic data** (~15K samples): Generated documents mimicking ~13 real-world formats with diverse layouts and styles

For more details, see the [arabic-image2html dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/OussamaBenSlama/arabic-image2html).

## Training Procedure

Training was performed in two stages:

**Stage 1:**
- Data: 40% of training dataset
- Learning rate: 5e-5
- LR scheduler: Linear

**Stage 2:**
- Data: 30% of training dataset (different split)
- Learning rate: 1e-5
- LR scheduler: Cosine


## Performance

Evaluated by the NAMAA community on an anonymous benchmark dataset:

| Model | WER | CER | BLEU |
|-------|-----|-----|------|
| Alef-OCR-Image2Html | 0.92 | **0.72** | **0.19** |
| Qari-OCR-v0.3 (baseline) | **0.84** | 0.73 | 0.17 |

**Key Results:**
- Better Character Error Rate (CER): 0.72 vs 0.73
- Better BLEU Score: 0.19 vs 0.17
- Higher Word Error Rate (WER) due to limited diacritics handling in training data


## Related Resources

- **Dataset:** [arabic-image2html](https://huggingface.co/datasets/OussamaBenSlama/arabic-image2html)
- **Training and Inference Notebooks:** [Available in the repository](https://github.com/OussamaBenSlama/Alef-OCR-Image2Html)

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{alef_ocr_image2html_2025,
  title={Alef-OCR-Image2Html: Arabic OCR to Semantic HTML},
  author={Oussama Ben Slama},
  year={2025},
  howpublished={Hugging Face Models},
  url={https://huggingface.co/OussamaBenSlama/Alef-OCR-Image2Html}
}
```

## Acknowledgments

This work builds upon:
- The NAMAA community's state-of-the-art Qari-OCR model

## License

Apache2.0