Combining different classification approaches to improve off-line Arabic handwritten word recognition

Machine perception and recognition of handwritten text in any language is a difficult problem. Even for Latin script most solutions are restricted to specific domains like bank checks courtesy amount recognition. Arabic script presents additional challenges for handwriting recognition systems due to its highly connected nature, numerous forms of each letter, and other factors. In this paper we address the problem of offline Arabic handwriting recognition of pre-segmented words. Rather than focusing on a single classification approach and trying to perfect it, we propose to combine heterogeneous classification methodologies. We evaluate our system on the IFN/ENIT corpus of Tunisian village and town names and demonstrate that the combined approach yields results that are better than those of the individual classifiers.