Combination of Pruned Kohonen Maps for On-line Arabic Characters Recognition

The purpose of this study is to investigate a method for high performance on-line Arabic characters recognition. This method is based on the use of Kohonen maps and their corresponding confusion matrices which serve to prune them of error-causing nodes, and to combine them consequently. We use two Kohonen maps obtained using two distinct character representations, namely, Fourier descriptors and tangents extracted along the characters online signals. The two Kohonen maps are then combined using a majority vote decision rule that, for each character, favors the most reliable map. This combination, without adding in any significant way to the process complexity, affords a much better recognition rate.