Shape-Based Alphabet for Off-line Arabic Handwriting Recognition

This article describes an off-line handwritten Arabic words recognition system. Both explicit grapheme segmentation and feature extraction are originally designed for Latin cursive handwriting. The recognizer itself is a hybrid HMM/NN. We introduce a new shape-based alphabet for handwriting Arabic recognition which is intended to benefit from some specificities of Arabic writing. We performed several experiments using IFN/ENIT benchmark database to validate our approach. Our recognizer performs as close as the state of the art recognition rate with 87%. The latter results are indeed very encouraging as many perspectives and improvements may be considered. Especially, the explicit processing of dots and diacritics, therefore making use of more prior knowledge of Arabic writing specificities.