An intelligent approach for Arabic handwritten letter recognition using convolutional neural network

Abstract

Currently, digital transformation has occurred in most countries in the world to varying degrees, but digitizing business processes are complex in terms of understanding the various aspects of manual documentation. The use of digital devices and intelligent systems is vital in the digital transformation of manual documentation from hardcopy to digital formats. The transformation of handwritten documents into electronic files is one of the principal aspects of digitization and represents a common need shared by today’s businesses. Generally, handwriting recognition poses a complex digitization challenge, and Arabic handwriting recognition, specifically, proves inordinately challenging due to the nature of Arabic scripts and the excessive diversity in human handwriting. This study presents an intelligent approach for recognizing handwritten Arabic letters. In this approach, a convolution neural network (CNN) model is proposed to recognize handwritten Arabic letters. The model is regularized using batch normalization and dropout operations. Moreover, the model was tested with and without dropout, resulting in a significant difference in the performance. Hence, the model overfitting has been prevented using dropout regularization. The proposed model was applied to the prominent, publicly-available Arabic handwritten characters (AHCD) dataset with 16,800 letters, and the performance was measured using several evaluation measures. The experimental results show the best fit of the proposed model in terms of higher accuracy results that reached 96.78%; additionally, other evaluation measures compared to popular domain-relevant approaches in the literature.