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KotenOCR: An Offline iOS App for Recognizing Classical Japanese Cursive Script

KotenOCR: An Offline iOS App for Recognizing Classical Japanese Cursive Script

Introduction Reading kuzushiji — the cursive script used in pre-modern Japanese texts — is challenging even for trained scholars. While AI-powered OCR has made machine recognition possible in recent years, as far as I could find, no tool previously offered offline kuzushiji recognition on a smartphone. KotenOCR brings the National Diet Library’s lightweight kuzushiji OCR model (NDL Koten OCR-Lite) to iOS, letting you recognize classical Japanese text simply by taking a photo — with no internet connection required. ...