A Kraken recognition model for historical Jawi (Arabic-script Malay) text, fine-tuned for newspaper material from 1930s–1960s Singapore and Malaya. Developed by culturalheritagenus.

This model recognises printed Jawi script — the Arabic-alphabet writing system historically used for Malay — as found in newspapers such as Utusan Melayu (1960s) and Warta Malaya (1930s) from the National Library of Singapore. It handles the extended Jawi character set (including ڬ, چ, ڠ, ڽ, ݢ and other characters not present in standard Arabic), as well as embedded Latin text, Eastern Arabic numerals, and common punctuation.

The model operates on individual line images: it expects a pre-cropped image containing a single line of text and returns the recognised characters with per-character coordinates and confidence scores.

The model was fine-tuned from the Kraken printed Arabic base model (10.5281/zenodo.7050270), which achieves roughly 20% CER on this material out of the box. Fine-tuning was done using resize='both' to extend the output layer for Jawi-specific characters absent from the base model's alphabet.

Training data consisted of approximately 1,800 lines total: 1,600 gold-standard lines from Utusan Melayu and Warta Malaya (each line independently transcribed by two annotators, with disagreements resolved through normalisation or manual adjudication), plus 200 synthetic lines generated from digital Jawi text and typefaces.

Hyperparameters: 100 epochs, learning rate 0.0001, data augmentation enabled. Trained on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU for approximately 10 hours.

This is a Kraken model, not a Hugging Face transformers model. Use it via the Kraken library with huggingface_hub to download the weights.

The record object contains three aligned lists: record.prediction (the full recognised string), record.cuts (per-character bounding polygons in pixel coordinates relative to the input image), and record.confidences (per-character confidence values between 0 and 1).

The text direction settings deserve a brief explanation. The segmentation container uses text_direction='horizontal-rl' and base_dir='R' because these control how Kraken feeds the line image to the neural network — the LSTM must process the pixels right-to-left for Arabic-script text. The bidi_reordering='L' parameter is a separate post-processing step that reorders the output string using the Unicode BiDi algorithm with LTR as the paragraph base direction, so that Arabic/Jawi runs appear as embedded RTL spans. This makes the output suitable for direct display in any Unicode-aware environment.

This model performs recognition only — it does not segment pages into lines. You must provide pre-cropped single-line images. For full-page OCR, pair this model with a segmentation step (e.g. Kraken's baseline segmenter, YOLO, or Surya) to extract line images first.

To fine-tune this model on your own Jawi data, download the .mlmodel file and pass it as the base model to Kraken's training API:

See the Kraken training documentation for details on preparing PAGE XML ground truth.

The model was trained on printed Jawi newspaper text from a specific era and set of publications. Performance may degrade on handwritten text, significantly different typefaces, or heavily degraded/blurry images. The character set covers standard Jawi plus common Arabic and Latin characters found in Malayan newspapers, but rare characters or unusual orthographic conventions may not be recognised.

Since the model operates on individual lines, any errors in the upstream segmentation step (line detection, baseline placement, boundary polygon extraction) will directly affect recognition quality.

Developed by culturalheritagenus. Source material from the National Library of Singapore. Built with Kraken (v6.x), developed at Inria and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Université PSL.