Pre-processing Issues in Arabic OCR

Abstract

Pre-processing of scanned documents is a necessary first step in the process cycle of any document processing application. While pre-processing methods are generally language independent, the effectiveness of downstream OCR processes can often be improved by language/script specific adaptations, particularly in the case of non-Latin scripts such as Arabic and Indic scripts. In this chapter, we present some techniques that have proven effective for the pre-processing of handwritten Arabic documents.