A New Computational Method for Arabic Calligraphy Style Representation and Classification

Abstract

Despite the importance of recognizing Arabic calligraphy styles and their potential usefulness for many applications, a very limited number of Arabic calligraphy style recognition works have been established. Thus, we propose a new computational tool for Arabic calligraphy style recognition (ACSR). The present work aims to identify Arabic calligraphy style (ACS) from images where text images are captured by different tools from different resources. To this end, we were inspired by the indices used by human experts to distinguish different calligraphy styles. These indices were transformed into a descriptor that defines, for each calligraphy style, a set of specific features. Three scenarios have been considered in the experimental part to prove the effectiveness of the proposed tool. The results confirmed the outperformance of both individual and combine features coded by our descriptor. The proposed work demonstrated outstanding performance, even with few training samples, compared to other related works for Arabic calligraphy recognition.

Keywords

• document image analyzing
• Arabic calligraphy
• feature extraction
• machine learning