Segments Interpolation Extractor for Finding the Best Fit Line in Arabic Offline Handwriting Recognition Words

Abstract

In the last few years, deep learning-based models have made significant inroads into the field of handwriting recognition. However, deep learning requires the availability of massive labelled data and considerable computation for training or automatic feature extraction. The role of handcrafted features and their significance is still crucial for a specific language type because it is a unique way of writing the characters. These are primitive segments that describe the letter horizontally or vertically distinguish an Arabic letter. This article develops a new type of feature for handwriting using Segments Interpolation (SI) to find the best fitting line in each of the windows and build a model for finding the best operating point window size for SI features. The experimental design was done on two subsets of the Institute for Communications Technology/Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Tunis (IFN/ENIT) database. The first one contains 10 classes (C10), and the second one has 22 classes (C22). The extracted features were trained with Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) with different kernels and activation functions. The evaluation metrics from a classification perspective (Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F-measure) were applied. As a result, SI shows significant results with SVM 90.10% accuracy for C10 and 88.53% accuracy for C22.

Keywords

• Arabic handwriting word recognition
• classification
• ELM
• feature extraction
• segments interpolation
• SVM