Generalized Hough Transform for Arabic Printed Optical Character Recognition

Sofien Touj¹, Najoua Ben Amara², and Hamid Amiri¹

¹National Engineers School of Tunis, Tunisia

² National Engineers School of Monastir, Tunisia

Abstract: The Hough Transform (HT) is a technique commonly used in image processing. It is known for its capacity to detect objects in a given image. In the present paper, we propose to explore the properties of the HT and the use of the Generalized HT (GHT) in Arabic Optical Character Recognition (AOCR). Hence, we first present a GHT based approach for the recognition of Arabic printed characters in their different shapes depending on their position in the word. Accordingly character models are stored in a structure called dictionary which is used further for text recognition. In fact, we have proposed two segmentation-by-recognition techniques for cursive printed writing recognition. The first one uses a technique by a dynamic sliding window. The second one is based on the identification and the localisation of the characters within a word or a part of a word called also sub word. Some outcomes of this study are also assessed in this paper.

Keywords: Generalized Hough transform, Arabic printed optical character recognition, printed cursive writing, segmentation by recognition techniques.

Received July 6, 2004; accepted November 1, 2004