Hybrid DBLSTM-SVM Based Beta-Elliptic-CNN Models for Online Arabic Characters Recognition

Abstract

The deep learning-based approaches have proven highly successful in handwriting recognition which represents a challenging task that satisfies its increasingly broad application in mobile devices. Recently, several research initiatives in the area of pattern recognition studies have been introduced. The challenge is more earnest for Arabic scripts due to the inherent cursiveness of their characters, the existence of several groups of similar shape characters, large sizes of respective alphabets, etc. In this paper, we propose an online Arabic character recognition system based on hybrid Beta-Elliptic model (BEM) and convolutional neural network (CNN) feature extractor models and combining deep bidirectional long short-term memory (DBLSTM) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. First, we use the extracted online and offline features to make the classification and compare the performance of single classifiers. Second, we proceed by combining the two types of feature-based systems using different combination methods to enhance the global system discriminating power. We have evaluated our system using LMCA and Online-KHATT databases. The obtained recognition rate is in a maximum of 95.48% and 91.55% for the individual systems using the two databases respectively. The combination of the on-line and off-line systems allows improving the accuracy rate to 99.11% and 93.98% using the same databases which exceed the best result for other state-of-the-art systems.