Arabic Cursive Characters Distributed Recognition using the DTW Algorithm on BOINC: Performance Analysis

Abstract

Volunteer computing or volunteer grid computing constitute a very promising infrastructure which provides enough computing and storage powers without any prior cost or investment. Indeed, such infrastructures are the result of the federation of several, geographically dispersed, computers or/and LAN computers over the Internet. Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is considered the most well- known volunteer computing infrastructure. In this paper, we are interested, rather, by the distribution of the Arabic OCR (Optical Character Recognition) based on the DTW (Dynamic Time Warping) algorithm on the BOINC, in order, to prove again that volunteer computing provides very interesting and promising infrastructures to speed up, at will, several greedy algorithms or applications, especially, the Arabic OCR based on the DTW algorithm. What makes very attractive the Arabic OCR based on the DTW algorithm is the following, first, its ability to recognize, properly, words or sub words, without any prior segmentation, from within a reference library of isolated characters. Second, its good immunity against a wide range of noises. Obtained first results confirm, indeed, that the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing constitutes an interesting and promising framework to speed up the Arabic OCR based on the DTW algorithm.