Multi-agent Systems for Arabic Handwriting Recognition

This paper aims to give a presentation of the PhD defended by Boulid Youssef on December 26th, 2016 at University Ibn Tofail, entitled “Arabic handwritten recognition in an offline mode”. The adopted approach is realized under the multi agent paradigm. The dissertation was held in Faculty of Science Kénitra in a publicly open presentation. After the presentation, Boulid was awarded with the highest grade (Très honorable avec félicitations de jury)

A Novel Method to Detect Segmentation points of Arabic Words using Peaks and Neural Network

Many methods of segmentation using detection of segmentation points or where the location of segmentation points is expected before the segmentation process,  the validity of segmentation points is verified by using ANNs. In this paper apply a novel method to detect correctly of location segmentation points by detect of peaks with neural networks for Arabic word. This method employs baseline and peaks identification; where using two steps to segmenting text. Where peaks identification function is applied which at the subword segment level to frame the minimum and maximum peaks, and baseline detection. Where these two steps have led to the best result through the model depends on minimum peaks attained by utilising a stroke operator with a view to extracting potential points of segmentation, and determining the baseline procedure was developed to approximate the parameters. Where this method has yielded highly accurate positive results for Arabic characters’ segmentation with four kinds of handwritten datasets as AHDB, IFN-ENIT, AHDB-FTR and ACDAR. Earlier results showed that the use of EDMS to MLP_ANN gives better results than GLCM and MOMENT in different groups and gives results of EDMS features on MNN with an accuracy level of 95.09% classifier for IFN-ENIT set of data

Segmentation of Arabic Handwritten Documents into Text Lines using Watershed Transform

A crucial task in character recognition systems is the segmentation of the document into text lines and especially if it is handwritten. When dealing with non-Latin document such as Arabic, the challenge becomes greater since in addition to the variability of writing, the presence of diacritical points and the high number of ascender and descender characters complicates more the process of the segmentation. To remedy with this complexity and even to make this difficulty an advantage since the focus is on the Arabic language which is semi-cursive in nature, a method based on the Watershed Transform technique is proposed. Tested on «Handwritten Arabic Proximity Datasets» a segmentation rate of 93% for a 95% of matching score is achieved

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Automatic Identification of Errors in Arabic Handwriting Recognition

Arabic handwriting recognition (HR) is a challenging problem due to Arabic's connected letter forms, consonantal diacritics and rich morphology. In this paper we isolate the task of identification of erroneous words in HR from the task of producing corrections for these words. We consider a variety of linguistic (morphological and syntactic) and non-linguistic features to automatically identify these errors. We also consider a learning curve varying in two dimensions: number of segments and number of n-best hypotheses to train on. We additionally evaluate the performance on different test sets with different degrees of errors in them. Our best approach achieves a roughly ~20% absolute increase in F-score over a simple but reasonable baseline. A detailed error analysis shows that linguistic features, such as lemma models, help improve HR-error detection precisely where we expect them to: semantically inconsistent error words

Segmentation-free Word Spotting for Handwritten Arabic Documents

In this paper we present an unsupervised segmentation-free method for spotting and searching query, especially, for images documents in handwritten Arabic, for this, Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOGs) are used as the feature vectors to represent the query and documents image. Then, we compress the descriptors with the product quantization method. Finally, a better representation of the query is obtained by using the Support Vector Machines (SVM)

Handwritten Arabic Documents Segmentation into Text Lines using Seam Carving

Inspired from human perception and common text documents characteristics based on readability constraints, an Arabic text line segmentation approach is proposed using seam carving. Taking the gray scale of the image as input data, this technique offers better results at extracting handwritten text lines without the need for the binary representation of the document image. In addition to its fast processing time, its versatility permits to process a multitude of document types, especially documents presenting low text-to-background contrast such as degraded historical manuscripts or complex writing styles like cursive handwriting. Even if our focus in this paper was on Arabic text segmentation, this method is language independent. Tests on a public database of 123 handwritten Arabic documents showed a line detection rate of 97.5% for a matching score of 90%