Arabic Optical Character Recognition

Abstract

Arabic text recognition is receiving more attentions from both Arabic and non-Arabic-speaking researchers. This chapter provides a general overview of the state-of-the-art in Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and the associated text recognition technology. It also investigates the characteristics of the Arabic language with respect to OCR and discusses related research on the different phases of text recognition including: pre-processing and text segmentation, common feature extraction techniques, classification methods and post-processing techniques. Moreover, the chapter discusses the available databases for Arabic OCR research and lists the available commercial Software. Finally, it explores the challenges related to Arabic OCR and discusses possible future trends.