On-line Arabic handwriting recognition with templates

After a long period of focus on western and Asian scripts there is now a general trend in the on-line handwriting recognition community to explore recognition of other scripts such as Arabic and various Indic scripts. One difficulty with the Arabic script is the number and position of diacritic marks associated to Arabic characters. This paper explores the application of a template matching scheme to the recognition of Arabic script with a novel algorithm for dynamically treating the diacritical marks. Experiments have been conducted with very large dictionary sizes with encouraging results.