Classification of Arabic Alphabets Using a Combination of a Convolutional Neural Network and the Morphological Gradient Method

Abstract

The field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of converting an image of text into a machine-readable text format. The classification of Arabic manuscripts in general is part of this field. In recent years, the processing of Arabian image databases by deep learning architectures has experienced a remarkable development. However, this remains insufficient to satisfy the enormous wealth of Arabic manuscripts. In this research, a deep learning architecture is used to address the issue of classifying Arabic letters written by hand. The method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture as a self-extractor and classifier. Considering the nature of the dataset images (binary images), the contours of the alphabets are detected using the mathematical algorithm of the morphological gradient. After that, the images are passed to the CNN architecture. The available database of Arabic handwritten alphabets on Kaggle is utilized for examining the model. This database consists of 16,800 images divided into two datasets: 13,440 images for training and 3,360 for validation. As a result, the model gives a remarkable accuracy equal to 99.02%.

Keywords

• Handwritten Arabic characters, Deep learning, Morphological gradient, Convolutional neural network, Optical character recognition