New Segmentation Method for Analytical Recognition of Arabic Handwriting Using a Neural-Markovian Method

Abstract

A new hybrid system of off-line analytical recognition of Arabic handwriting combining a neural network type multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and hidden Markov models (HMM) is presented. We propose a way to cooperate HMM and MLP neural network in a probabilistic architecture taking advantage of both tools dedicated to the recognition of Arabic literal amounts. This description is based on statistical and structural characteristics extraction of the significant character of the handwritten Arabic words, which can be used in the MLP classification module to estimate probabilities used as the observations to perform a recognition by the HMM. The originality of our approach is based on the segmentation into characters taking into account diacritics with the characters that match them. The experiments show the convergence of the global system, even with a random initialization of the neural network. Keywords - Recognition of Arabic handwriting, hidden Markov models, fast K-means, Arabic literal amounts, multi-layer perceptron. * E-mail: khaoula_1190@hotmail.com