Guide to OCR for Arabic Scripts

This Guide to OCR for Arabic Scripts is the first book of its kind, specifically devoted to this emerging field. Topics and features: contains contributions from the leading researchers in the field; with a Foreword by Professor Bente Maegaard of the University of Copenhagen; presents a detailed overview of Arabic character recognition technology, covering a range of different aspects of pre-processing and feature extraction; reviews a broad selection of varying approaches, including HMM-based methods and a recognition system based on multidimensional recurrent neural networks; examines the evaluation of Arabic script recognition systems, discussing data collection and annotation, benchmarking strategies, and handwriting recognition competitions; describes numerous applications of Arabic script recognition technology, from historical Arabic manuscripts to online Arabic recognition.

Volker Märgner is Academic Director of the Institute for Communications Technology (IfN) at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. He has over 30 years research experience in image processing, pattern recognition, and handwriting recognition. He developed the IfN/ENIT-database of Arabic handwritten names which is the reference for Arabic handwritten word recognition systems and organized competitions both together with Haikal El Abed.

Haikal El Abed is a Senior Research Engineer at the Institute for Communications Technology (IfN) at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. He has more than 10 years research experience in pattern recognition and Arabic text recognition, on-line and off-line. He organizes competitions and works on the collection of databases.