Intelligent Arabic Handwriting Recognition Using Different Standalone and Hybrid CNN Architectures

Abstract

Handwritten character recognition is a computer-vision-system problem that is still critical and challenging in many computer-vision tasks. With the increased interest in handwriting recognition as well as the developments in machine-learning and deep-learning algorithms, researchers have made significant improvements and advances in developing English-handwriting-recognition methodologies; however, Arabic handwriting recognition has not yet received enough interest. In this work, several deep-learning and hybrid models were created. The methodology of the current study took advantage of machine learning in classification and deep learning in feature extraction to create hybrid models. Among the standalone deep-learning models trained on the two datasets used in the experiments performed, the best results were obtained with the transfer-learning model on the MNIST dataset, with 0.9967 accuracy achieved. The results for the hybrid models using the MNIST dataset were good, with accuracy measures exceeding 0.9 for all the hybrid models; however, the results for the hybrid models using the Arabic character dataset were inferior.