A Novel Dataset for English-Arabic Scene Text Recognition (EASTR)-42K and Its Evaluation Using Invariant Feature Extraction on Detected Extremal Regions

© 2019 IEEE. The recognition of text in natural scene images is a practical yet challenging task due to the large variations in backgrounds, textures, fonts, and illumination. English as a secondary language is extensively used in Gulf countries along with Arabic script. Therefore, this paper introduces English-Arabic scene text recognition 42K scene text image dataset. The dataset includes text images appeared in English and Arabic scripts while maintaining the prime focus on Arabic script. The dataset can be employed for the evaluation of text segmentation and recognition task. To provide an insight to other researchers, experiments have been carried out on the segmentation and classification of Arabic as well as English text and report error rates like 5.99% and 2.48%, respectively. This paper presents a novel technique by using adapted maximally stable extremal region (MSER) technique and extracts scale-invariant features from MSER detected region. To select discriminant and comprehensive features, the size of invariant features is restricted and considered those specific features which exist in the extremal region. The adapted MDLSTM network is presented to tackle the complexities of cursive scene text. The research on Arabic scene text is in its infancy, thus this paper presents benchmark work in the field of text analysis

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%

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

Text Line Segmentation of Historical Documents: a Survey

There is a huge amount of historical documents in libraries and in various National Archives that have not been exploited electronically. Although automatic reading of complete pages remains, in most cases, a long-term objective, tasks such as word spotting, text/image alignment, authentication and extraction of specific fields are in use today. For all these tasks, a major step is document segmentation into text lines. Because of the low quality and the complexity of these documents (background noise, artifacts due to aging, interfering lines),automatic text line segmentation remains an open research field. The objective of this paper is to present a survey of existing methods, developed during the last decade, and dedicated to documents of historical interest.Comment: 25 pages, submitted version, To appear in International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, On line version available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/k2813176280456k3

Component-based Segmentation of words from handwritten Arabic text

Efficient preprocessing is very essential for automatic recognition of handwritten documents. In this paper, techniques on segmenting words in handwritten Arabic text are presented. Firstly, connected components (ccs) are extracted, and distances among different components are analyzed. The statistical distribution of this distance is then obtained to determine an optimal threshold for words segmentation. Meanwhile, an improved projection based method is also employed for baseline detection. The proposed method has been successfully tested on IFN/ENIT database consisting of 26459 Arabic words handwritten by 411 different writers, and the results were promising and very encouraging in more accurate detection of the baseline and segmentation of words for further recognition