Recognition of Arabic handwritten words using convolutional neural network

Abstract

A new method for recognizing automatically Arabic handwritten words was presented using convolutional neural network architecture. The proposed method is based on global approaches, which consists of recognizing all the words without segmenting into the characters in order to recognize them separately. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a particular supervised type of neural network based on multilayer principle; our method needs a big dataset of word images to obtain the best result. To optimize our system, a new database was collected from the benchmarking Arabic handwriting database using the pre-processing such as rotation transformation, which is applied on the images of the database to create new images with different features. The convolutional neural network applied on our database that contains 40320 of Arabic handwritten words (26880 images for training set and 13440 for test set). Thus, different configurations on a public benchmark database were evaluated and compared with previous methods. Consequently, it is demonstrated a recognition rate with a success of 96.76%.