This dataset is part of the Odia Lipi Project, an open and collaborative initiative led in collaboration with AHRC IIT Bhubaneswar, aimed at building high-quality OCR resources for the Odia language. It contains scanned page images paired with human-validated Odia text, intended to support OCR model training, post-OCR correction, NLP research, and the digital preservation of Odia literature and documents.

The dataset currently focuses on accurately digitizing printed Odia text and is designed to be extended to handwritten sources and multimodal OCR settings in future releases.

Uses

This dataset is intended for:

Training and evaluating OCR models for the Odia language
Post-OCR text correction and alignment tasks
NLP research in low-resource Indian languages
Digitization and preservation of Odia books, manuscripts, and archival documents

The dataset may also be used for academic research and non-commercial applications focused on language technology and cultural preservation.

Contributors

Siba Prasad Sahu
Manas Behera
Satyam Swarup Rout
Sk Shahid
Sambit Sekhar
Ganeshan K

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the Odia Bibhaba team (https://odiabibhaba.in/) for curating old Odia literature, including books, magazines, and artifacts, which has been instrumental in building this open-source OCR dataset.

Citation

If you find this repository useful, please consider giving 👏 and citing:

@misc{odia_lipi_ocr_2026,
  author = {
    Siba Prasad Sahu and
    Manas Behera and
    Satyam Swarup Rout and
    Sk Shahid and
    Sambit Sekhar and
    Ganeshan K
  },
  title = {Odia Lipi: An Open-Source OCR Dataset for the Odia Language},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  journal = {Hugging Face Datasets},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/OdiaGenAI}},
}

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Downloads last month: 47