Bio-inspired BAT optimization algorithm for handwritten Arabic characters recognition

There are many difficulties facing a handwritten Arabic recognition system such as unlimited variation in human handwriting, similarities of distinct character shapes, interconnections of neighboring characters and their position in the word. This paper presents a handwritten Arabic character recognition system based on BA algorithm. BA algorithm is adopted to reduce the feature set size and to improve the accuracy rate. The proposed system is trained and tested by four well-known classifiers; Bayes Network (BN), artificial neural network (ANN), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), and Random forest (RF) with CENPARMI dataset. The proposed optimization algorithm obtained promising results in terms of classification accuracy as the proposed system is able to recognize 91.59 % of our test set correctly, as well as in terms of computational time reduction. BA algorithm is more efficient in most experiments when comparing with GA and PSO. When compared our results with other related works we find that our result is the highest among other published results.