A Proposed Hybrid Technique for Recognizing Arabic Characters

Optical character recognition systems improve human-machine interaction and are urgently required for many governmental and commercial departments. A considerable progress in the recognition techniques of Latin and Chinese characters has been achieved. By contrast, Arabic Optical Character Recognition (AOCR) is still lagging although the interest and research in this area is becoming more intensive than before. This is because the Arabic is a cursive language, written from right to left, each character has two to four different forms according to its position in the word, and most characters are associated with complementary parts above, below, or inside the character. The process of Arabic character recognition passes through several stages; the most serious and error-prone of which are segmentation, and feature extraction & classification. This research focuses on the feature extraction and classification stage, being as important as the segmentation stage. Features can be classified into two categories; Local features, which are usually geometric, and Global features, which are either topological or statistical. Four approaches related to the statistical category are to be investigated, namely: Moment Invariants, Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix, Run Length Matrix, and Statistical Properties of Intensity Histogram. The paper aims at fusing the features of these methods to get the most representative feature vector that maximizes the recognition rate. KeywordsOptical Character Recognition; Feature Extraction; Dimensionality Reduction; Principal Component Analysis; Feature Fusion.