Segmentation of connected Arabic characters using hidden Markov models

Because the Arabic text is connected by nature, segmentation of Arabic text into characters is a very important task for building an Arabic OCR. Although a lot of work has been done in this area, there is no perfect technique for segmentation has been used until now. In this paper, discrete hidden Markov models are used for segmentation of Arabic words into letters. The results are very encouraging. A system has been built and used for testing the proposed algorithm and the segmentation results achieved 99%.