Combination of pruned Kohonen maps for on-line arabic characters recognition

The purpose of this study is to investigate a methodfor high performance on-line Arabic characters recognition.This method is based on the use of Kohonen mapsand their corresponding confusion matrices which serve toprune them of error-causing nodes, and to combine themconsequently. We use two Kohonen maps obtained usingtwo distinct character representations, namely, Fourier descriptorsand tangents extracted along the characters on-linesignals. The two Kohonen maps are then combined usinga majority vote decision rule that, for each character,favors the most reliable map. This combination, withoutadding in any significant way to the process complexity, affordsa much better recognition rate.