Efficient Gabor-Based Recognition for Handwritten Arabic-Indic Digits

Abstract

In daily life, the need of automatically digitizing paper documentations and recognizing textual images is still present with existing and potential upcoming rooms for improvements, especially for languages like Arabic, which is unlike English as an instance, has more complex context and not been extensively supported by research in a such domain. As yet, the available online offline optical character recognition (OCR) systems have utilized functional techniques and achieved high performance mainly on machine printed data images. However, in case of handwritten script, the recognition task becomes highly unconstrained and much more challenging. Amongst a large verity of recognizable multi-lingual characters, handwritten digit recognition is a considerably useful task for different purposes and countless applications. In this research, the focus is on Arabic (known today as Indic or Indian) digit recognition using different proposed Gabor-based approaches in several combinations with different classification methods. The proposed approaches are trained and tested using 91120 digit samples of two independent standard databases (Arabic-Handwritten-Digits and AHDBase), allowing performance variability assessments and comparisons not only between the different combinations of features and classifiers but also between different datasets. The proposed Arabic-Indic digit recognition system achieves high recognition rates reach up to 99.87%. This research practically shows that one of the proposed approaches with significant dimensionality reduced features remains attaining a high recognition rate with low complexity time, which can be hence recommended further for online digit recognition systems.