Character recognition of Arabic and Latin scripts

The goal to produce effective optical character recognition (OCR) methods has led to the development of a number of algorithms. The purpose of these is to take the handwritten or printed text and to translate it into a corresponding digital form. The multitude requirements and developments are well represented in the literature (I.S.I. Abuhaiba et al., 1994: C.Y. Suen, 1986). The primary objective of the paper is to provide an insight into a robust system which has been successfully developed and employed to recognise Latin and Arabic characters and whose workings has been described previoulsy (J. Cowell and F. Hussain, 2000). The focus is to discuss the main components used in the multi-stage system, paying particular attention to the normalisation process used for orientation and size for a given bitmapped character. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through its workings for the Arabic and Latin case, both for characters and numbers