Off-Line Arabic Handwriting Character Recognition Using Word Segmentation

The ultimate aim of handwriting recognition is to make computers able to read and/or authenticate human written texts, with a performance comparable to or even better than that of humans. Reading means that the computer is given a piece of handwriting and it provides the electronic transcription of that (e.g. in ASCII format). Two types of handwriting: on-line and offline. The most important purpose of off-line handwriting recognition is in protection systems and authentication. Arabic Handwriting scripts are much more complicated in comparison to Latin scripts. This paper introduces a simple and novel methodology to authenticate Arabic handwriting characters. Reaching our aim, we built our own character database. The research methodology depends on two stages: The first is character extraction where preprocessing the word and then apply segmentation process to obtain the character. The second is the character recognition by matching the characters comprising the word with the letters in the database. Our results ensure character recognition with 81%. We eliminate FAR by using similarity percent between 45-55%. Our research is coded using MATLAB.