No abstract

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of extracting handwritten or printed text from a scanned or printed image and converting it to a machine-readable form for further data processing, such as searching or editing. Automatic text extraction using OCR helps to digitize documents for improved productivity and accessibility and for preservation of historical documents. This paper provides a survey of the current state-of-the-art applications, techniques, and challenges in Arabic OCR. We present the existing methods for each step of the complete OCR process to identify the best-performing approach for improved results. This paper follows the keyword-search method for reviewing the articles related to Arabic OCR, including the backward and forward citations of the article. In addition to state-of-art techniques, this paper identifies research gaps and presents future directions for Arabic OCR.

International Energy Agency estimates that 1 billion people worldwide have no access to electricity. Commonly prevalent offgrid electrification strategies through a) standalone solar and b) low-power central microgrids are largely suboptimal or prohibitively high cost for services beyond basic electrification (light and mobile phone charging). Distributed solar generation, distributed storage architecture (DGDSA) for DC microgrids with peer-to-peer electricity sharing is now widely reported as the most optimized architecture from systems efficiency perspective with allowance of higher power delivery through resource aggregation. However, DGDSA at distribution voltage of 48V or 380V may have significantly varying efficiencies based on the spatial distribution of village houses for any offgrid electrification scheme. In this work, we evaluate both 380V and 48V distribution for LVDC microgrids incorporating a) converter efficiency and b) distribution efficiency for a typical village deployment in an offgrid scenario. System level efficiency is evaluated for peer to peer power sharing with varying inter-house distance. Results show that for power sharing of 100W, 48V distribution grid is an optimized choice for inter-house distance of up to 100m. For sharing of larger power and higher inter-house distance, 380 V grid becomes a more efficient choice.