Comprehensive collection for Arabic characters and numbers written by hand

Abstract

An Optical Character Recognition system for Arabic language should recognize Arabic handwritten words. However, it is difficult to find a freely accessible and comprehensive database of all Arabic words that can be employed for this purpose. Therefore, it is more efficient to divide the Arabic words into sub-words or characters. As there is no comprehensive Arabic handwritten character database that is accessible free of charge, interested researchers can utilize the database developed as a part of this work in recognition system training and output testing.In the present paper, a database is presented containing scanned images of 700 Arabic handwritten characters, Hindi numbers used in Arabic countries, and some special characters utilized in Arabic alphabet, along with their different positions (e.g., standalone, initial, medial and terminal), different sizes, styles and font colors. The aim is to provide sufficient samples for all character shapes for software training, resulting in greater accuracy in the recognition phase.These forms were filled by students of the Applied Sciences College, University of Technology, Baghdad, Iraq and were scanned at the 200, 300, and 600 dpi resolution. A graphical user interface (GUI) software environment is employed to make the manipulation of the created database easier, and provide many image processing functions that are allowed to be built the database easier

Keywords

• arabic text recognition
• arabic characters
• hindi numbers
• image database