Gabor wavelet recognition approach for off-line handwritten Arabic using explicit segmentation

Abstract

This article proposes an un-constrained recognition approach for the handwritten Arabic script. The approach starts by explicitly segment each word image into its constituent letters, then a filter-bank of Gabor wavelet transform is used to extract feature vectors corresponding to different scales and orientation in the segmented image. Classification is carried out by employing a support vectors machine algorithm, where IESK-arDB and IFN/ENIT databases are used for testing and evaluation of the proposed approach respectively. A Leave-one-out estimation strategy is followed to assess performance, where results confirmed the approach efficiency.