On-line Arabic handwriting recognition with templates

After a long period of focus on western and East Asian scripts there is now a general trend in the on-line handwriting recognition community to explore recognition of other scripts such as Arabic and various Indic scripts. One difficulty with the Arabic script is the number and position of diacritic marks associated to Arabic characters. This paper explores the application of a template matching scheme to the recognition of Arabic script with a novel algorithm for dynamically treating the diacritical marks. Template based systems are robust to conditions with scarce training data and in experiments the proposed system outperformed a reference system based on the promising state-of-the-art network technique of BLSTM. Experiments have been conducted in an environment similar to that of many handheld devices with promising results both in terms of memory consumption and response time.