Application of soft computing techniques in machine reading of Quranic Kufic manuscripts

Abstract Research work in the field of offline Arabic handwriting recognition has seen an exponential growth during past decades. Despite much work dedicated to the recognition of handwritten Arabic text, there remains a lot to achieve in this regard. Though there exists a lot of work that is confined to the Arabic text, this paper presents an approach towards classifying and recognizing text written in one of the famous scripts of Arabic language i.e. Kufic script. The approach based on character segmentation does not perform well in recognizing Kufic text due to various complexities. The proposed system is based on word segmentation and employs a Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) feature extraction techniques. Later in the paper a comparison is given between the numerical results of proposed technique with previous Arabic text recognition techniques to show the effectiveness of present work. This approach yields effective results with 97.05% accuracy in recognizing the Arabic text written in Kufic script using Polynomial kernel of SVM classifier. Experimental results show that the proposed system for recognition of Kufic script performs better than the previous recognition systems for Arabic text.