Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Based on Stationary Wavelet Transform Technique using Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper is aimed at improving the performance of the word recognition system (WRS) of handwritten Arabic text by extracting features in the frequency domain using the Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) method using machine learning, which is a wavelet transform approach created to compensate for the absence of translation invariance in the  Discrete Wavelets Transform (DWT) method. The proposed SWT-WRS of Arabic handwritten text consists of three main processes: word normalization, feature extraction based on SWT, and recognition. The proposed SWT-WRS based on the SWT method is evaluated on the IFN/ENIT database applying the Gaussian, linear, and polynomial support vector machine, the k-nearest neighbors, and ANN classifiers. ANN performance was assessed by applying the Bayesian Regularization (BR) and Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) training methods. Numerous wavelet transform (WT) families are applied, and the results prove that level 19 of the Daubechies family is the best WT family for the proposed SWT-WRS. The results also confirm the effectiveness of the proposed SWT-WRS in improving the performance of handwritten Arabic word recognition using machine learning. Therefore, the suggested SWT-WRS overcomes the lack of translation invariance in the DWT method by eliminating the up-and-down samplers from the proposed machine learning method.