A hybrid approach for off-line Arabic handwriting recognition based on a Planar Hidden Markov modeling

A novel approach for the Arabic handwriting recognition is presented. The use of a planar hidden Markov model (PHMM) has permitted to split the Arabic script into five homogeneous horizontal regions. Each region was described by a 1D-HMM. This modeling is based on different levels of segmentation: horizontal, natural and vertical. Both holistic and analytical approaches have been tested for the description of the median band of the Arabic writing. We show finally that a hybrid approach conducted to the improvement of the whole system performances.