Guide to OCR for Arabic Scripts

Part I: Pre-Processing

An Assessment of Arabic Handwriting Recognition Technology
Sargur N. Srihari and Gregory Ball

Layout Analysis of Arabic Script Documents
Syed Saqib Bukhari, Faisal Shafait and Thomas M. Breuel

A Multi-Stage Approach to Arabic Document Analysis
Eugene Borovikov and Ilya Zavorin

Pre-Processing Issues in Arabic OCR
Zhixin Shi, Srirangaraj Setlur and Venu Govindaraju

Segmentation of Ancient Arabic Documents
Abdel Belaïd and Nazih Ouwayed

Features for HMM-Based Arabic Handwritten Word Recognition Systems
Laurence Likforman-Sulem, Ramy Al Hajj Mohammad, Chafic Mokbel, Fares Menasri, Anne-Laure Bianne-Bernard and Christopher Kermorvant

Part II: Recognition

Printed Arabic Text Recognition
Irfan Ahmed, Sabri A. Mahmoud and Mohammed Tanvir Parvez

Handwritten Arabic Word Recognition Using the IFN/ENIT-Database
Mario Pechwitz, Haikal El Abed and Volker Märgner

RWTH OCR: A Large Vocabulary Optical Character Recognition System for Arabic Scripts
Philippe Dreuw, David Rybach, Georg Heigold and Hermann Ney

Arabic Handwriting Recognition using Bernoulli HMMs
Ihab Alkhoury, Adrià Giménez and Alfons Juan

Handwritten Farsi Words Recognition Using Hidden Markov Models
Puntis Jifroodian and Ching Y. Suen

Offline Arabic Handwriting Recognition with Multidimensional Recurrent Neural Networks
Alex Graves

Application of Fractal Theory in Farsi/Arabic Document Analysis
Saeed Mozaffari

Multi-Stream Markov Models for Arabic Handwriting Recognition
Yousri Kessentini, Thierry Paquet and AbdelMajid Ben Hamadou

Towards Distributed Cursive Writing OCR Systems based on the Combination of Complementary Approaches
Maher Khemakhem and Abdelfettah Belghith

Part III: Evaluation

Data Collection and Annotation for Arabic Document Analysis
Ilya Zavorin and Eugene Borovikov

Arabic Handwriting Recognition Competitions
Volker Märgner and Haikal El Abed

Benchmarking Strategy for Arabic Screen Rendered Word Recognition
Fouad Slimane, Slim Kanoun, Jean Hennebert, Rolf Ingold, Adel M. Alimi and Jean Hennebert

Part IV: Applications

A Robust Word Spotting System for Historical Arabic Manuscripts
Mohamed Cheriet and Reza Farrahi Moghaddam

Arabic Text recognition using a Script-Independent Methodology: A Unified HMM-based Approach for Machine-print and Handwritten Text
Premkumar Natarajan, Rohit Prasad, Huaigu Cao, Krishna Subramanian, Shirin Saleem, David Belanger, Shiv Vitaladevuni, Matin Kamali and Ehry MacRostie

Arabic Handwriting Recognition Using VDHMM and Over-Segmentation
Amlan Kundu and Tom Hines

Online Arabic Databases and Applications
Houcine Boubaker, Abdelkarim Elbaati, Najiba Tagougui, Haikal El Abed, Monji Kherallah and Adel M. Alimi

Online Arabic Handwritten Words Recognition Based on HMM and Combination of Online and Offline Features
Sherif Abdelazeem, Hesham M. Eraqi and Hany Ahmed

Volker Märgner is Academic Director of the Institute for Communications Technology (IfN) at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. He has over 30 years research experience in image processing, pattern recognition, and handwriting recognition. He developed the IfN/ENIT-database of Arabic handwritten names which is the reference for Arabic handwritten word recognition systems and organized competitions both together with Haikal El Abed.

Haikal El Abed is a Senior Research Engineer at the Institute for Communications Technology (IfN) at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. He has more than 10 years research experience in pattern recognition and Arabic text recognition, on-line and off-line. He organizes competitions and works on the collection of databases.