Perceptual Recognition of Arabic Literal Amounts

Since humans are the best readers, one of the most promising trends in automatic handwriting recognition is to get inspiration from psychological reading models. The underlying idea is to derive benefits from studies of human reading, in order to build efficient automatic reading systems. In this context, we propose a human reading inspired system for the recognition of Arabic handwritten literalamounts. Our approach is based on the McClelland and Rumelhart's neural model called IAM, which is one of the most referenced psychological reading models. In this article, we have adapted IAM to suit the Arabic writing characteristics, such as the natural existence of sub-words, and the particularities of the considered literal amounts vocabulary. The core of the proposed system is a neural network classifier with local knowledge representation, structured hierarchically into three levels: perceptual structural features, sub-words and words. In contrast to the classical neural networks, localist approach is more appropriate to our problem. Indeed, it introduces a priori knowledge which leads to a precise structure of the network and avoids the black box aspect as well as the learning phase. Our experimental recognition results are interesting and confirm our expectation that adapting human reading models is a promising issue in automatic handwritten word recognition

Human Reading Based Strategies for off-line Arabic Word Recognition

International audienceThis paper summarizes some techniques proposed for off-line Arabic word recognition. The point of view developed here concerns the human reading favoring an interactive mechanism between global memorization and local checking making easier the recognition of complex scripts as Arabic. According to this consideration, some specific papers are analyzed and their strategies commente

Decision Fusion and Contextual Information for Arabic Words Recognition for Computing and Informatics

The study of multiple classifier systems has become recently an area of intensive research in pattern recognition. Also in handwriting recognition, systems combining several classifiers have been investigated. An approach for recognizing the legal amount for handwritten Arabic bank check is described in this article. The solution uses multiple information sources to recognize words. The recognition step is preformed with a parallel combination of three kinds of classifiers using holistic word structural features. The classification stage results are first normalized, and the sum combination is performed as a decision fusion scheme, after which a syntactic analyzer makes final decision on the candidate words. Using this approach, the obtained results are very interesting and promising

Recognition of handwritten Arabic characters

The subject of handwritten character recognition has been receiving considerable attention in recent years due to the increased dependence on computers. Several methods for recognizing Latin, Chinese as well as Kanji characters have been proposed. However, work on recognition of Arabic characters has been relatively sparse. Techniques developed for recognizing characters in other languages can not be used for Arabic since the nature of Arabic characters is different. The shape of a character is a function of its location within a word where each character can have two to four different forms. Most of the techniques proposed to date for recognizing Arabic characters have relied on structural and topographic approaches. This thesis introduces a decision-theoretic approach to solve the problem. The proposed method involves, as a first step, digitization of the segmented character. The secondary part of the character (dots and zigzags) are then isolated and identified separately thereby reducing the recognition issue to a 20 class problem or less for each of the character forms. The moments of the horizontal and vertical projections of the remaining primary characters are calculated and normalized with respect to the zero order moment. Simple measures of shape are obtained from the normalized moments and incorporated into a feature vector. Classification is accomplished using quadratic discriminant functions. The approach was evaluated using isolated, handwritten characters from a data base established for this purpose. The classification rates varied from 97.5% to 100% depending on the form of the characters. These results indicate that the technique offers significantly better classification rates in comparison with existing methods

Character Recognition

Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field

Structure Extraction in Printed Documents Using Neural Approaches

This paper addresses the problem of layout and logical structure extraction from image documents. Two classes of approaches are first studied and discussed in general terms: data-driven and model-driven. In the latter, some specific approaches like rule-based or formal grammar are usually studied on very stereotyped documents providing honest results, while in the former artificial neural networks are often considered for small patterns with good results. Our understanding of these techniques let us to believe that a hybrid model is a more appropriate solution for structure extraction. Based on this standpoint, we proposed a Perceptive Neural Network based approach using a static topology that possesses the characteristics of a dynamic neural network. Thanks to its transparency, it allows a better representation of the model elements and the relationships between the logical and the physical components. Furthermore, it possesses perceptive cycles providing some capacities in data refinement and correction. Tested on several kinds of documents, the results are better than those of a static Multilayer Perceptron

Template Based Recognition of On-Line Handwriting

Software for recognition of handwriting has been available for several decades now and research on the subject have produced several different strategies for producing competitive recognition accuracies, especially in the case of isolated single characters. The problem of recognizing samples of handwriting with arbitrary connections between constituent characters (emph{unconstrained handwriting}) adds considerable complexity in form of the segmentation problem. In other words a recognition system, not constrained to the isolated single character case, needs to be able to recognize where in the sample one letter ends and another begins. In the research community and probably also in commercial systems the most common technique for recognizing unconstrained handwriting compromise Neural Networks for partial character matching along with Hidden Markov Modeling for combining partial results to string hypothesis. Neural Networks are often favored by the research community since the recognition functions are more or less automatically inferred from a training set of handwritten samples. From a commercial perspective a downside to this property is the lack of control, since there is no explicit information on the types of samples that can be correctly recognized by the system. In a template based system, each style of writing a particular character is explicitly modeled, and thus provides some intuition regarding the types of errors (confusions) that the system is prone to make. Most template based recognition methods today only work for the isolated single character recognition problem and extensions to unconstrained recognition is usually not straightforward. This thesis presents a step-by-step recipe for producing a template based recognition system which extends naturally to unconstrained handwriting recognition through simple graph techniques. A system based on this construction has been implemented and tested for the difficult case of unconstrained online Arabic handwriting recognition with good results

Multimodal biometrics scheme based on discretized eigen feature fusion for identical twins identification

The subject of twins multimodal biometrics identification (TMBI) has consistently been an interesting and also a valuable area of study. Considering high dependency and acceptance, TMBI greatly contributes to the domain of twins identification in biometrics traits. The variation of features resulting from the process of multimodal biometrics feature extraction determines the distinctive characteristics possessed by a twin. However, these features are deemed as inessential as they cause the increase in the search space size and also the difficulty in the generalization process. In this regard, the key challenge is to single out features that are deemed most salient with the ability to accurately recognize the twins using multimodal biometrics. In identification of twins, effective designs of methodology and fusion process are important in assuring its success. These processes could be used in the management and integration of vital information including highly selective biometrics characteristic possessed by any of the twins. In the multimodal biometrics twins identification domain, exemplification of the best features from multiple traits of twins and biometrics fusion process remain to be completely resolved. This research attempts to design a new scheme and more effective multimodal biometrics twins identification by introducing the Dis-Eigen feature-based fusion with the capacity in generating a uni-representation and distinctive features of numerous modalities of twins. First, Aspect United Moment Invariant (AUMI) was used as global feature in the extraction of features obtained from the twins handwritingfingerprint shape and style. Then, the feature-based fusion was examined in terms of its generalization. Next, to achieve better classification accuracy, the Dis-Eigen feature-based fusion algorithm was used. A total of eight distinctive classifiers were used in executing four different training and testing of environment settings. Accordingly, the most salient features of Dis-Eigen feature-based fusion were trained and tested to determine the accuracy of the classification, particularly in terms of performance. The results show that the identification of twins improved as the error of similarity for intra-class decreased while at the same time, the error of similarity for inter-class increased. Hence, with the application of diverse classifiers, the identification rate was improved reaching more than 93%. It can be concluded from the experimental outcomes that the proposed method using Receiver Operation Characteristics (ROC) considerably increases the twins handwriting-fingerprint identification process with 90.25% rate of identification when False Acceptance Rate (FAR) is at 0.01%. It is also indicated that 93.15% identification rate is achieved when FAR is at 0.5% and 98.69% when FAR is at 1.00%. The new proposed solution gives a promising alternative to twins identification application