A multipurpose multi-agent system based on a loosely coupled architecture to speedup the DTW algorithm for Arabic printed cursive OCR

Summary form only given. This paper aims to prove through an analytical study that even a loosely coupled architecture such as a grid computing can be used to support an effective multiagent system in many ways especially to speedup the dynamic time warp algorithm (DTW) for Arabic printed cursive OCR. The adaptation of the (DTW) algorithm to Arabic printed cursive OCR provides excellent recognition rate without a prior characters segmentation especially for some font sizes (16, 18, and 20). Experiments show that the DTW algorithm is able to recognize perfectly Arabic printed cursive characters by the use of a references library formed only of isolated characters (one occurrence per character). The major problem of the DTW is the slowness of its response time because of the enormous amount of computation to achieve. Multiagent systems (MAS) are very flexible and are considered to be a very attractive framework to support distributed applications, performance evaluation of the proposed MAS shows that the task granularity is one of the key performance parameters that can govern the number of agents to use and the achievable speedup. We found in particular that if the amount of computation achieved by the MAS is greater 2 times than the maximum amount of communication and synchronization required by any two agents (of the MAS) then the proposed MAS is effective.