mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Handwritten Optical Character Recognition (OCR): A Comprehensive Systematic Literature Review (SLR)

arXiv 2001.00139 ↗First posted 1 Jan 2020cs.CV cs.LGcited by 56

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Abstract (arXiv)

Given the ubiquity of handwritten documents in human transactions, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of documents have invaluable practical worth. Optical character recognition is a science that enables to translate various types of documents or images into analyzable, editable and searchable data. During last decade, researchers have used artificial intelligence / machine learning tools to automatically analyze handwritten and printed documents in order to convert them into electronic format. The objective of this review paper is to summarize research that has been conducted on character recognition of handwritten documents and to provide research directions. In this Systematic Literature Review (SLR) we collected, synthesized and analyzed research articles on the topic of handwritten OCR (and closely related topics) which were published between year 2000 to 2018. We followed widely used electronic databases by following pre-defined review protocol. Articles were searched using keywords, forward reference searching and backward reference searching in order to search all the articles related to the topic. After carefully following study selection process 142 articles were selected for this SLR. This review article serves the purpose of presenting state of the art results and techniques on OCR and also provide research directions by highlighting research gaps.

Key facts. Cited by 56 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 1 Jan 2020.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 7; 2022: 14; 2023: 9; 2024: 9; 2025: 12; 2026: 5.

56 papers.

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  1. 2021TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Modelscited by 278
  2. 2022What Does it Mean for a Language Model to Preserve Privacy?cited by 194
  3. 2022VLP: A Survey on Vision-Language Pre-trainingcited by 159
  4. 2024M3DocRAG: Multi-modal Retrieval is What You Need for Multi-page Multi-document Understandingcited by 110
  5. 2023DocILE Benchmark for Document Information Localization and Extractioncited by 58
  6. 2023Let's Think Outside the Box: Exploring Leap-of-Thought in Large Language Models with Creative Humor Generationcited by 56
  7. 2021Rethinking Text Line Recognition Modelscited by 45
  8. 2023DTrOCR: Decoder-only Transformer for Optical Character Recognitioncited by 40
  9. 2025SimpleDoc: Multi-Modal Document Understanding with Dual-Cue Page Retrieval and Iterative Refinementcited by 27
  10. 2024Opportunities and Challenges of Large Language Models for Low-Resource Languages in Humanities Researchcited by 26
  11. 2021Rescoring Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Text Line Recognition with CTC-Prefixescited by 18
  12. 2025MoLoRAG: Bootstrapping Document Understanding via Multi-modal Logic-aware Retrievalcited by 17
38 more
  1. 2022Text-DIAE: A Self-Supervised Degradation Invariant Autoencoders for Text Recognition and Document Enhancementcited by 16
  2. 2024A Comprehensive Survey of Convolutions in Deep Learning: Applications, Challenges, and Future Trendscited by 16
  3. 2022Two Decades of Bengali Handwritten Digit Recognition: A Surveycited by 13
  4. 2022Business Document Information Extraction: Towards Practical Benchmarkscited by 11
  5. 2025CLaMR: Contextualized Late-Interaction for Multimodal Content Retrievalcited by 9
  6. 2022Breast Cancer Classification using Deep Learned Features Boosted with Handcrafted Featurescited by 5
  7. 2022Text Detection Forgot About Document OCRcited by 5
  8. 2023Literature Review: Computer Vision Applications in Transportation Logistics and Warehousingcited by 5
  9. 2022Open Source Handwritten Text Recognition on Medieval Manuscripts using Mixed Models and Document-Specific Finetuningcited by 4
  10. 2024Mixed Text Recognition with Efficient Parameter Fine-Tuning and Transformercited by 4
  11. 2025Performance Analysis of Few-Shot Learning Approaches for Bangla Handwritten Character and Digit Recognitioncited by 4
  12. 2025From Standalone LLMs to Integrated Intelligence: A Survey of Compound Al Systemscited by 4
  13. 2026MM-Doc-R1: Training Agents for Long Document Visual Question Answering through Multi-turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 4
  14. 2021Artificial Intelligence For Breast Cancer Detection: Trends & Directionscited by 3
  15. 2022Explainable Artificial Intelligence to Detect Image Spam Using Convolutional Neural Networkcited by 3
  16. 2022Handwritten Arabic Character Recognition for Children Writ-ing Using Convolutional Neural Network and Stroke Identificationcited by 3
  17. 2024A Literature Review of Literature Reviews in Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligencecited by 3
  18. 2025Fine-grained Video Dubbing Duration Alignment with Segment Supervised Preference Optimizationcited by 3
  19. 2025Attention Grounded Enhancement for Visual Document Retrievalcited by 3
  20. 2021Ontology-based Feature Selection: A Surveycited by 2
  21. 2022Captcha Attack: Turning Captchas Against Humanitycited by 2
  22. 2023Vulnerability Analysis of Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition to Adversarial Attackscited by 2
  23. 2024Image-to-LaTeX Converter for Mathematical Formulas and Textcited by 2
  24. 2022Automatic Image Content Extraction: Operationalizing Machine Learning in Humanistic Photographic Studies of Large Visual Archivescited by 1
  25. 2022Offline Handwritten Mathematical Recognition using Adversarial Learning and Transformerscited by 1
  26. 2023Invisible Threats: Backdoor Attack in OCR Systemscited by 1
  27. 2023IDPL-PFOD2: A New Large-Scale Dataset for Printed Farsi Optical Character Recognitioncited by 1
  28. 2024PEaCE: A Chemistry-Oriented Dataset for Optical Character Recognition on Scientific Documentscited by 1
  29. 2024Handwritten Code Recognition for Pen-and-Paper CS Educationcited by 1
  30. 2025Comparative analysis of optical character recognition methods for S'ami texts from the National Library of Norwaycited by 1
  31. 2025Handwritten Digit Recognition: An Ensemble-Based Approach for Superior Performancecited by 1
  32. 2025Extracting Explainable Dates From Medical Images By Reverse-Engineering UNIX Timestampscited by 1
  33. 2025GraDeT-HTR: A Resource-Efficient Bengali Handwritten Text Recognition System utilizing Grapheme-based Tokenizer and Decoder-only Transformercited by 1
  34. 2026Intelligent Character Recognition of Handwritten Forms with Deep Neural Networkscited by 1
  35. 2021An End-to-End Khmer Optical Character Recognition using Sequence-to-Sequence with Attentioncited by 0
  36. 2021Classification of Documents Extracted from Images with Optical Character Recognition Methodscited by 0
  37. 2022Character decomposition to resolve class imbalance problem in Hangul OCRcited by 0
  38. 2023Semantic rule Web-based Diagnosis and Treatment of Vector-Borne Diseases using SWRL rulescited by 0

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