Arabic Font Recognition Using Decision Trees Built From Common Words

We present an algorithm for a priori Arabic optical Font Recognition (AFR). The basic idea is to recognize fonts of some common Arabic words. Once these fonts are known, they can be generalized to lines, paragraphs, or neighbor non-common words since these components of a textual material almost have the same font. A decision tree is our approach to recognize Arabic fonts. A set of 48 features is used to learn the tree. These features include horizontal projections, Walsh coefficients, invariant moments, and geometrical attributes. A set of 36 fonts is investigated. The overall success rate is 90.8%. Some fonts show 100% success rate. The average time required to recognize the word font is approximately 0.30 seconds

Generating an Arabic Calligraphy Text Blocks for Global Texture Analysis

This paper objective is to improve the current method for generating an Arabic Calligraphy text blocks. We test on seven types of Arabic Calligraphy text. We apply  projection profiles and a proposed filter to discriminate each line of the Arabic Calligraphy scripts. After performing text detection, skew correction, text and line normalization subsequently, we generate Arabic Calligraphy text blocks for global texture analysis purposes. We compare our proposed filter with current method and median filter. The results show that the proposed filter  is outperformed. The proposed method can be further  improved to boost the overall performance

Content Recognition and Context Modeling for Document Analysis and Retrieval

The nature and scope of available documents are changing significantly in many areas of document analysis and retrieval as complex, heterogeneous collections become accessible to virtually everyone via the web. The increasing level of diversity presents a great challenge for document image content categorization, indexing, and retrieval. Meanwhile, the processing of documents with unconstrained layouts and complex formatting often requires effective leveraging of broad contextual knowledge. In this dissertation, we first present a novel approach for document image content categorization, using a lexicon of shape features. Each lexical word corresponds to a scale and rotation invariant local shape feature that is generic enough to be detected repeatably and is segmentation free. A concise, structurally indexed shape lexicon is learned by clustering and partitioning feature types through graph cuts. Our idea finds successful application in several challenging tasks, including content recognition of diverse web images and language identification on documents composed of mixed machine printed text and handwriting. Second, we address two fundamental problems in signature-based document image retrieval. Facing continually increasing volumes of documents, detecting and recognizing unique, evidentiary visual entities (\eg, signatures and logos) provides a practical and reliable supplement to the OCR recognition of printed text. We propose a novel multi-scale framework to detect and segment signatures jointly from document images, based on the structural saliency under a signature production model. We formulate the problem of signature retrieval in the unconstrained setting of geometry-invariant deformable shape matching and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in signature matching and verification. Third, we present a model-based approach for extracting relevant named entities from unstructured documents. In a wide range of applications that require structured information from diverse, unstructured document images, processing OCR text does not give satisfactory results due to the absence of linguistic context. Our approach enables learning of inference rules collectively based on contextual information from both page layout and text features. Finally, we demonstrate the importance of mining general web user behavior data for improving document ranking and other web search experience. The context of web user activities reveals their preferences and intents, and we emphasize the analysis of individual user sessions for creating aggregate models. We introduce a novel algorithm for estimating web page and web site importance, and discuss its theoretical foundation based on an intentional surfer model. We demonstrate that our approach significantly improves large-scale document retrieval performance

Arabic text classification methods: Systematic literature review of primary studies

Recent research on Big Data proposed and evaluated a number of advanced techniques to gain meaningful information from the complex and large volume of data available on the World Wide Web. To achieve accurate text analysis, a process is usually initiated with a Text Classification (TC) method. Reviewing the very recent literature in this area shows that most studies are focused on English (and other scripts) while attempts on classifying Arabic texts remain relatively very limited. Hence, we intend to contribute the first Systematic Literature Review (SLR) utilizing a search protocol strictly to summarize key characteristics of the different TC techniques and methods used to classify Arabic text, this work also aims to identify and share a scientific evidence of the gap in current literature to help suggesting areas for further research. Our SLR explicitly investigates empirical evidence as a decision factor to include studies, then conclude which classifier produced more accurate results. Further, our findings identify the lack of standardized corpuses for Arabic text; authors compile their own, and most of the work is focused on Modern Arabic with very little done on Colloquial Arabic despite its wide use in Social Media Networks such as Twitter. In total, 1464 papers were surveyed from which 48 primary studies were included and analyzed

Advances in Character Recognition

This book presents advances in character recognition, and it consists of 12 chapters that cover wide range of topics on different aspects of character recognition. Hopefully, this book will serve as a reference source for academic research, for professionals working in the character recognition field and for all interested in the subject

Named Entity Recognition for Urdu Language: The UNER System, A Hybrid Approach

NER is a natural language processing technique that primarily classifies parts of parsed text into well-known named entities. In the domain of natural language processing, the recognition of name entities is used to classify nouns that appear in bulk text data and place these nouns into predefined groups, such as names of people, places, times, dates, organizations, etc. There is a lot of fragmented material and data on the Cyberspace, therefore scholars are working on several languages (i.e: Sindhi, English, etc.), by working on various approaches and techniques depending on their locations, to improve accessibility of filtered information for online users. The NER enhance the quality of NLP in applications including automated summarization, semantic web search, information extraction and retrieval machine translation and question answering, chatbots and others. This study designs an efficient framework to extract noun entities in Urdu using a hybrid approach. The UNER system not only extracts entities by searching through a list of names, but also extracts named entities by recognizing phrases in a given text. The UNER system is designed to recognize Urdu noun entities in pre-defined categories such as places, personal names, titled personal names, organizations, object names, trade names, abbreviations, dates and times, measurements, and text names in Urdu

Detection and recognition of textual information from drug box images using deep learning and computer vision

The scope of this thesis work is to implement an OCR pipeline, capable of detecting and recognizing text instances when an image is given as input. The pipeline is divided into two steps: a detector, which scope is to detect the regions where a text is present, and a recognizer, which scope is to recognize and read the detected words and numbers. The work was initially developed during the internship experience in the start-up PatchAI, now an Alira Health company. The application of the algorithm in this context is the recognition of textual information on drug boxes. The idea is to deploy such pipeline into an app support, in such a way it can be used by patients, who can take a picture of the box and receive information about the medicine, in particular its posology. Also the use of a vocal assistant that reads orally the recognized text is explored, being a interesting application for ederly or visually impaired people.The scope of this thesis work is to implement an OCR pipeline, capable of detecting and recognizing text instances when an image is given as input. The pipeline is divided into two steps: a detector, which scope is to detect the regions where a text is present, and a recognizer, which scope is to recognize and read the detected words and numbers. The work was initially developed during the internship experience in the start-up PatchAI, now an Alira Health company. The application of the algorithm in this context is the recognition of textual information on drug boxes. The idea is to deploy such pipeline into an app support, in such a way it can be used by patients, who can take a picture of the box and receive information about the medicine, in particular its posology. Also the use of a vocal assistant that reads orally the recognized text is explored, being a interesting application for ederly or visually impaired people