A syntactic recognizer for arabic characters

Commercial OCR systems for high quality Latin characters are widely available. However, the recognition of Arabic characters, particularly those of poor quality, is still an important research area. This paper gives details of two recognition systems for isolated Arabic characters based on the extraction of critical features. The limitations of this approach and its successful extension to a syntactic recognition system are discussed. The syntactic system uses a new web grammar, in which the critical features are nodes and a set of operators describes the spatial relationships between them. The approach used is insensitive to variations in the size and orientation of the characters and even the relative lengths of strokes. The described system has been implemented and the theoretical behaviour of this approach is supported by the experimental results.