Hybrid Approach to Features Extraction for Online Arabic Character Recognition

Recognition of Arabic Character field has been gaining more interest for many years, and a large number of research papers and reports have already been published in this area. There are several major issues with Arabic character recognition: Arabic characters are spelled differently (depending on whether they are isolated, at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the word), multiple characters can have the same body but a number and/or position of various diacritics. The size of the Arabic characters may vary from one writer to another and even within the writing of a single writer, etc. This paper presents a new approach for feature extraction step of online handwritten Arabic character using global and local features. The system was tested with 2000 Characters written by different writers and the best rate of recognition obtained was 92.43%.