Bayes Classification of Online Arabic Characters by Gibbs Modeling of Class Conditional Densities

This study investigates Bayes classification of online Arabic characters using histograms of tangent differences and Gibbs modeling of the class-conditional probability density functions. The parameters of these Gibbs density functions are estimated following the Zhu et al. constrained maximum entropy formalism, originally introduced for image and shape synthesis. We investigate two partition function estimation methods: one uses the training sample, and the other draws from a reference distribution. The efficiency of the corresponding Bayes decision methods, and of a combination of these, is shown in experiments using a database of 9,504 freely written samples by 22 writers. Comparisons to the nearest neighbor rule method and a Kohonen neural network method are provided.