Advanced Stroke Labeling Technique Based on Directions Features for Arabic Character Segmentation

Abstract

Offline Character segmentation of text images is an important step in many document image analysis and recognition (DIAR) applications. However, the character segmentation of both writing styles (printed and handwritten) remains an open problem. Moreover, the manual segmentation is time-consuming and impractical for large numbers of documents. Based on the unconstraint-cursive handwritten perspective, the auto character segmentation is more challenging and complex. The Arabic script writing style suffers from many common problems, such as sub-words overlapping, characters overlapping, and missed characters. These challenging issues have attracted the attention of researchers in the field of DIAR for Arabic character segmentation. The proposed method combines a new advanced Stroke Labelling based on Direction Features (SLDF2) technique and a modified vertical projection histogram (MVPH) technique. This technique extracts the relationship between each text stroke pixel and its 8 neighboring foreground pixels and labels it with the proper value before identify the possible segmentation points. The text preparation for the segmentation process was achieved using multiple preprocessing steps and developing an advanced stroke labelling technique based on direction features. Several Arabic language structural-rules were made to detect the candidate segmentation points (CSP), detect many character overlapping cases, solve the missed characters problem that appears as a result of using the text skeleton in VPH, and validate the CSP. All techniques and methods are tested on the ACDAR benchmark database. The validation method used to measure segmentation accuracy was a quantitative analysis that includes Recall, Precision, and F-measurement tests. The average accuracy of the proposed segmentation method was 92.44%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art method.