Towards Accurate Children’s Arabic Handwriting Recognition via Deep Learning

Automatic handwriting recognition has received considerable attention over the past three decades. Handwriting recognition systems are useful for a wide range of applications. Much research has been conducted to address the problem in Latin languages. However, less research has focused on the Arabic language, especially concerning recognizing children’s Arabic handwriting. This task is essential as the demand for educational applications to practice writing and spelling Arabic letters is increasing. Thus, the development of Arabic handwriting recognition systems and applications for children is important. In this paper, we propose two deep learning-based models for the recognition of children’s Arabic handwriting. The proposed models, a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a pre-trained CNN (VGG-16) were trained using Hijja, a recent dataset of Arabic children’s handwriting collected in Saudi Arabia. We also train and test our proposed models using the Arabic Handwritten Character Dataset (AHCD). We compare the performance of the proposed models with similar models from the literature. The results indicate that our proposed CNN outperforms the pre-trained CNN (VGG-16) and the other compared models from the literature. Moreover, we developed Mutqin, a prototype to help children practice Arabic handwriting. The prototype was evaluated by target users, and the results are reported.