A review of feature extraction techniques for handwritten Arabic text recognition

Research in Arabic handwritten recognition has been of growing interest in the last few decades. This is mainly due to its broad spectrum of applications in different fields such as bank check processing, form data entry, postal mail sorting, automatic processing of old manuscripts, etc. In the literature, numerous techniques have been proposed for feature extraction and applied to various types of images. This work provides a comprehensive review of these methods for off-line handwritten Arabic text recognition. It also presents recognition rates and descriptions of the databases used for the discussed approaches. This paper includes background on the field, discussion of feature extraction methods, and future research directions.