KAFD Arabic font database

•Introduces KAFD database for Arabic font recognition research.•It consists of 40 fonts, 10 sizes, and 4 styles with 100, 200, 300, and 600 dpi resolutions, respectively.•It presents our font recognition results using 20 fonts, 10 sizes and 4 styles.•Several features are implemented, best results are achieved with log-Gabor filters.•Applied our features to a second database of 10 fonts and compared results with published work.

Font recognition is useful for improving optical text recognition systems’ accuracy and time, and to restore the documents’ original formats. This paper addresses a need for Arabic font recognition research by introducing an Arabic font recognition database consisting of 40 fonts, 10 sizes (ranging from 8 to 24 points) and 4 styles (viz. normal, bold, italic, and bold–italic). The database is split into three sets (viz. training, validation, and testing). The database is freely available to researchers.1 Moreover, we introduce a baseline font recognition system for benchmarking purposes, and report identification rates on our KAFD database and the Arabic Printed Text Image (APTI) database with 20 and 10 fonts, respectively. The best recognition rates are achieved using log-Gabor filters.