Real-time Arabic handwritten character recognition

This paper considers the development of a real-time Arabic handwritten character recognition system. The shape of an Arabic character depends on its position in a given word. The system assumes that characters result from a reliable segmentation stage, thus, the position of the character is known a priori. Four different sets of character shapes have been independently considered. Each set is further divided into four subsets depending on the number of strokes in the character. The system has been heavily tested and the average recognition rate has been found to be 99.6% where all the misrecognized characters were actually written with little care. The system can be reliably used for the recognition of on-line handwritten characters entered via a graphic tablet