A recognition-based Arabic optical character recognition system

Abstract

Optical character recognition systems improve human-machine interaction and are widely used in many government and commercial departments. After forty years of intensive research, OCR systems for most scripts are well developed. However, not for Arabic script. Since Arabic is a popular script, Arabic OCR systems should have great commercial value. Thus a recognition-based Arabic OCR system is proposed in this paper. It consists of the image acquisition, preprocessing, segmentation, character fragmentation, combination of character fragments, feature extraction, and classification. A signal is fed back to improve and determine the segmentation/recognition result. The system has been implemented and it has 90% recognition accuracy with a 20 chars/sec recognition rate.