AlexU-Word: A New Dataset for Isolated-Word Closed-Vocabulary Offline Arabic Handwriting Recognition

In this paper, we introduce the first phase of a new dataset for offline Arabic handwriting recognition. The aim is to collect a very large dataset of isolated Arabic words that covers all letters of the alphabet in all possible shapes using a small number of simple words. The end goal is to collect a very large dataset of segmented letter images, which can be used to build and evaluate Arabic handwriting recognition systems that are based on segmented letter recognition. The current version of the dataset contains $25114$ samples of $109$ unique Arabic words that cover all possible shapes of all alphabet letters. The samples were collected from $907$ writers. In its current form, the dataset can be used for the problem of closed-vocabulary word recognition. We evaluated a number of window-based descriptors and classifiers on this task and obtained an accuracy of $92.16\%$ using a SIFT-based descriptor and ANN.

Window-Based Descriptors for Arabic Handwritten Alphabet Recognition: A Comparative Study on a Novel Dataset

This paper presents a comparative study for window-based descriptors on the application of Arabic handwritten alphabet recognition. We show a detailed experimental evaluation of different descriptors with several classifiers. The objective of the paper is to evaluate different window-based descriptors on the problem of Arabic letter recognition. Our experiments clearly show that they perform very well. Moreover, we introduce a novel spatial pyramid partitioning scheme that enhances the recognition accuracy for most descriptors. In addition, we introduce a novel dataset for Arabic handwritten isolated alphabet letters, which can serve as a benchmark for future research.