A data base for Arabic handwritten text recognition research

In this paper we present a new database for off-line Arabic handwriting recognition, together with associated preprocessing procedures. We have developed a new database for the collection, storage and retrieval of Arabic handwritten text (AHDB). This is an advance both in terms of the size of the database as well as the number of different writers involved. We further designed an innovative, simple yet powerful, in place tagging procedure for our database. It enables us to easily extract the bitmaps of words. We also constructed a preprocessing class, which contains some useful preprocessing operations. In this paper the most popular words in Arabic writing were identified for the first time, using an associated program.