A Holistic Technique for an Arabic OCR System
by
Farhan M. A. Nashwan 1, Mohsen A. A. Rashwan 1, Hassanin M. Al-Barhamtoshy 2
, Sherif M. Abdou 3,* and Abdullah M. Moussa 1
Farhan M. A. Nashwan 1, Mohsen A. A. Rashwan 1, Hassanin M. Al-Barhamtoshy 2, Sherif M. Abdou 3,* and Abdullah M. Moussa 1
1
Department of Electronics and Electrical Communications, Cairo University, Giza 12613, Egypt
2
Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
3
Faculty of Computers & Information, Cairo University, Giza 12613, Egypt
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
J. Imaging 2018, 4(1), 6; https://doi.org/10.3390/jimaging4010006
Received: 30 October 2017 / Revised: 18 December 2017 / Accepted: 22 December 2017 / Published: 27 December 2017
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Document Image Processing)
Analytical based approaches in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems can endure a significant amount of segmentation errors, especially when dealing with cursive languages such as the Arabic language with frequent overlapping between characters. Holistic based approaches that consider whole words as single units were introduced as an effective approach to avoid such segmentation errors. Still the main challenge for these approaches is their computation complexity, especially when dealing with large vocabulary applications. In this paper, we introduce a computationally efficient, holistic Arabic OCR system. A lexicon reduction approach based on clustering similar shaped words is used to reduce recognition time. Using global word level Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) based features in combination with local block based features, our proposed approach managed to generalize for new font sizes that were not included in the training data. Evaluation results for the approach using different test sets from modern and historical Arabic books are promising compared with state of art Arabic OCR systems.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Nashwan, F.M.A.; Rashwan, M.A.A.; Al-Barhamtoshy, H.M.; Abdou, S.M.; Moussa, A.M. A Holistic Technique for an Arabic OCR System. J. Imaging 2018, 4, 6.
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