Isolated Arabic Handwritten Character Recognition: A Survey

Offline Arabic handwriting character recognition (AHCR) systems are very important since they make life easier for governments, researchers and scholars who are dealing with Arabic language in education, documentation and security. A widening use of the Arabic script in countries that deals with the Arabic language and countries that use the Arabic script in their languages such as Persian and Urdu makes offline Arabic handwriting character recognition a necessary system to have. Some of the benefits of such a system would be in processing checks, converting handwritten text into printed text, processing handwritten reports etc. The need for offline AHCR systems are more nowadays because of the expansion of technology and the convenience for customers. Many AHCR algorithms have been designed and implemented using various types of technologies which helped in reaching high recognition rate of accuracy. This paper presents a survey of the research published in this area. The paper will analysis and compare the various algorithms with respect to different stages of the offline AHCR. Preprocessing methods, feature extraction techniques and different classification approaches will also be presented. Future research in Arabic handwriting recognition will be discussed and analyzed. The paper also presents a new proposed two stages neuro-fuzzy approach for isolated Arabic handwritten character recognition system. KeywordsOffline Arabic Character Recognition, Genetic Algorithms, Fuzzy Logic, Neural Network, Fuzzy-Neural Systems