Improving OCR Accuracy Through Multi-Classifier Verification of Visually Similar Characters

Nuzhat Khan, Ab Al-Hadi Ab Rahman, Mohamad Anuar Kamaruddin, Muhammad Paend Bakht, Sana Fatima +2

Distinguishing visually similar characters is a persistent challenge for optical character recognition (OCR) systems, causing errors in critical applications of text digitization. While preprocessing techniques improve image quality and word-level post-processing corrects spelling errors, neither addresses character-level visual ambiguity, an intrinsic property of certain character pairs that limits even state-of-the-art OCR models. We present the Character Verification Model (CVM), a character-level post-processing framework that verifies and corrects ambiguous characters in OCR outputs using specialized binary classifiers trained on visually confusable pairs such as 'O'/'0', 'Z'/'2', and 'S'/'5'. CVM operates independently of dictionary validation, making it suitable for non-lexical data including serial numbers, alphanumeric codes, and license plates. Experiments on three OCR engines (Tesseract, EasyOCR, TrOCR) and ten fonts with low to high complexity demonstrate accuracy improvements of 3.95-14.81 percentage points, with an 87.3% correction rate for visually similar character errors and a false-correction rate of only 2.3%. The modular architecture integrates with existing…