Off-line Arabic Handwriting Recognition System Using Fast Wavelet Transform

In this research, off-line handwriting recognition system for Arabic alphabet is
introduced. The system contains three main stages: preprocessing, segmentation and
recognition stage. In the preprocessing stage, Radon transform was used in the design
of algorithms for page, line and word skew correction as well as for word slant
correction. In the segmentation stage, Hough transform approach was used for line
extraction. For line to words and word to characters segmentation, a statistical method
using mathematic representation of the lines and words binary image was used.
Unlike most of current handwriting recognition system, our system simulates the
human mechanism for image recognition, where images are encoded and saved in
memory as groups according to their similarity to each other. Characters are
decomposed into a coefficient vectors, using fast wavelet transform, then, vectors,
that represent a character in different possible shapes, are saved as groups with one
representative for each group. The recognition is achieved by comparing a vector of
the character to be recognized with group representatives.
Experiments showed that the proposed system is able to achieve the recognition task
with 90.26% of accuracy. The system needs only 3.41 seconds a most to recognize a
single character in a text of 15 lines where each line has 10 words on average.