Arabic text recognition systems - state of the art and future trends

Arabic character and text recognition methods for printed or handwritten characters are known since many years. We present in the first part of this paper a state of the art of Arabic text classification techniques and existing recognition systems. In the second part we discuss how evaluation methods and competitions help to support the development of text recognition systems and methods. Based on the results of the last Arabic handwriting recognition competition we show a concept to develop efficient recognition systems. On the basis of the actual situation of research future trends are described in the last part of this paper.