Spatial Distribution of Ink at Keypoints (SDIK): A Novel Feature for Word Spotting in Arabic Documents

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenging task of word spotting in Arabic handwritten documents. We proposed a novel feature that we called Spatial Distribution of Ink at Keypoints (SDIK). The proposed feature captures the characteristics of Arabic handwriting concentrated at endpoints and branch points. SDIK feature quantizes the spatial repartition of ink pixels in the neighborhoods of keypoints. The resulting SDIK features are very fast to match, we take this advantage to match a query word with lines images rather than words images. By this matching mechanism, we overcome the hard task of segmenting an Arabic document into words. The method proposed in this study is tested on historical Arabic document with IBN SINA dataset and on modern handwriting with IFN/ENIT database. The obtained results are great of interest for retrieving query words in an Arabic document.