MuSTEL: A Large-Scale Multilingual Synthetic Text-Line Image Dataset for OCR

Overview & Synopsis

Optical character recognition (OCR) systems depend strongly on the scale and diversity of their training data. One approach to document OCR first analyzes the page layout and extracts text-line images, which are then transcribed by a recognition model. Multilingual line-level recognition involving Persian, Arabic, and English presents additional challenges because different writing directions, fonts, and styles may coexist within a single line. This paper introduces MuSTEL, a large-scale synthetic multilingual OCR dataset containing more than 14.5 million annotated text-line images, organized into a training partition and predefined small and large test sets. Samples are generated from natural-language corpora, including multilingual content already present in the source texts. The generation framework incorporates capability-aware font selection, within-line font and style changes, mixed-direction text rendering, highlighting, and underlining. A validated repository of 2,009 font files from 711 families supports broad typographic coverage, while varied backgrounds, blur, geometric distortion, skew, stroke width, and image save quality provide diverse document-like appearances. Statistical analysis characterizes the dataset's language composition, transcription lengths, lexical and character-sequence diversity, image dimensions, typography, and rendering conditions. MuSTEL provides a resource for training and evaluating multilingual line-level OCR systems and investigating recognition robustness across languages, writing directions, and visual conditions.