Offline handwritten Arabic words recognition using Zernike moments and Hidden Markov Models

This paper presents the use of Hidden Markov Models (HMM) to classifying Arabic words that have been represented by moments into a set of predefined classes. The proposed scheme results in enhanced performance because it deals effectively with errors that commonly originate during the feature extraction stage and it accounts for variations due to the individual handwriting performance of different data sets. To overcome the variations in images, each is represented by rotation and scale invariant feature vector known as Pseudo Zernike Moments (PZM). To demonstrate its effectiveness, the proposed classification scheme has been employed in the context of different sets of handwritten Arabic words. The classification results demonstrate that the proposed approach can classify handwritten Arabic word with a error rate less than 10%.