Detection and Compensation of Undesirable ‎Discontinuities within the Farsi/Arabic Subwords

In this paper, an unexplored subject in the domains of Farsi/Arabic handwritten word preprocessing is introduced. Subwords ‎play a vital role in many applications such as cheque amount recognition, text recognition, lexicon reduction and subword-‎based word recognition. Correcting the faults occurred in subwords will improve the overall performance of these ‎applications. A subword is a connected-component in the main body of a word. The occurrence of a discontinuity in a ‎subword, divides the subword into two isolated parts. These parts are detected as two incorrect subwords. In our algorithm, ‎before correcting these faults, the baseline of each subword is corrected using the proposed baseline correction method. Then, ‎to limit the exploration area in matching stage, the dots are removed. Undesirable discontinuities in subwords are detected by ‎using a template matching algorithm. Disconnected parts of a subword are joined together by using three different methods. ‎Experiments show that the cubic polynomial-based compensation method causes the best results and 2.87 % improvement in ‎the subword recognition rate.