Arabic handwritten characters recognition system, towards improving its accuracy

Abstract

Although the extensive work towards building Optical Character Recognition systems(OCR) for Arabic handwritten characters, the unlimited variation and different writing styles of each character make building such these systems a big research challenge. In Arabic alphabetic system, each character has different forms (three or four) depending on its position in a word. In this paper, a handwritten character recognition system was proposed. The proposed system is implemented using a set of well-known optimizers, Bat Algorithm (BAT), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) algorithm. The proposed system was tested by well-known classifiers to test the efficiency; linear discriminant analysis, support vector machines and random forest. Among all of them, GWO greatly improves the classification accuracy and time efficiency. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the optimized feature sets were efficient than the whole feature set in terms of accuracy as well as time consumption.