Arabic Islamic Manuscripts Digitization Based on Hybrid K-NN/SVM Approach and Cloud Computing Technologies

Abstract

In many national libraries and archive centers, most of Islamic Manuscripts are still in their initial form and not digitized yet. These documents are indeed very rich in knowledge and constitute a part of the heritage of Muslims. The main reasons behind the digitization of these Islamic Manuscripts are, consequently and at least, to enhance and ease their accessibility by people who are interesting in order to exploit the corresponding knowledge and to improve their durability. Such a mission is not yet easy to achieve because of the weaknesses of the existing approaches and algorithms. Indeed, several researchers around the world have proposed a variety of approaches, algorithms and techniques in order to build a powerful system able to digitize such documents. Unfortunately, these efforts didn't succeed since they realized that such problem cannot be solved without the integration and cooperation of several strong complementary approaches, algorithms and techniques at the same time. But, such an idea and a system requires at the same time the knowledge of the good complementary approaches, algorithms and techniques which can lead to an acceptable recognition rate of the Arabic handwriting in one hand, and the adequate hardware infrastructure which can host such complex and greedy software to achieve the mission in a reasonable time on the other hand. Our idea consists on: in the first hand, to consider cloud computing as an infrastructure (IaaS) to deploy our combination of algorithms K-NN/SVM for Arabic Islamic Manuscripts Recognition System AIMRS. In the second hand, to consider cloud Storage as a Service (SaaS) to store and retrieve large amounts of Arabic Islamic Manuscripts. Our approach provides indeed an adequate platform for the expected powerful digitization system based on the integration and cooperation of some strong complementary approaches. In addition, our approach offers a number of benefits, such as the ability to store and retrieve large amounts of Islamic Manuscripts, the fast processing, the fast data access, and the unlimited storage.