Word Spotting in Handwritten Arabic Documents Using Bag-Of-Descriptors

This paper presents a query-by-example word spotting in handwritten Arabic documents, based on Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), without using any text word or line segmentation approach, because any errors affect to the subsequent word representation. First the interest points are automatically extracted from the images using SIFT detector, then, we use SIFT descriptor to represent each interest point in the images. In the end, we represent the image’s regions as histogram of visual words. The validate study is conducted under a series of controlled experiments on handwritten Arabic documents images.