Offline Arabic handwritten character recognition: from conventional machine learning system to deep learning approaches

Abstract

Researchers have made great strides in the area of Arabic handwritten character recognition in the last decades especially with the fast development of deep learning algorithms. The characteristics of Arabic manuscript text pose several problems for a recognition system. This paper presents a conventional machine learning system based on the extraction of a set of preselected features and an SVM classifier. In the second part, a simplified convolutional neural network (CNN) model is proposed, which is compared to six other CNN models based on the pre-trained architectures. The suggested methods were tested using three databases: two versions of the OIHACDB dataset and the AIA9K dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed CNN model obtained promising results, as it is able to recognise 94.7%, 98.3%, and 95.6% of the test set of the three databases OIHACDB-28, OIHACDB-40, and AIA9K, respectively.