Hybrid modelling of an off line Arabic handwriting recognition system: results and evaluation

Abstract

In this paper, we presented a state of the art in the field of Arabic handwriting recognition as well as the techniques used. Then, we detailed the general architecture of an Arabic Handwriting Recognition System (AHRS) and the contributions that we have proposed at each phase: first, an analytical segmentation approach based on a morphological/structural analysis of the entire word and sub word; then, a combination of different features to extract the relevant information from text image; thereafter, a hybrid classification approach using long short term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM-RNN) and different other statistical classifiers to learn many characters shapes simultaneously and to improve the performance of our proposed system; and finally, a post-processing approach to reconstruct the characters, words and lines of the text using Morpho-Syntactic analyser 'AlKhalil Morph Sys'. Our proposed system has shown promising results to solve the difficulties of Arabic handwriting recognition.