A survey on Arabic character segmentation

Arabic character segmentation is a necessary step in Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The cursive nature of Arabic script poses challenging problems in Arabic character recognition; however, incorrectly segmented characters will cause misclassifications of characters which in turn may lead to wrong results. Therefore, off-line Arabic character segmentation is a difficult research problem and little research has been achieved in this area in the past few decades. This is due to both the cursive nature of Arabic writing in both printed and handwritten forms and the scarcity of Arabic databases and dictionaries. Most of the character recognition methods used in the recognition of Arabic characters are adopted from available methods used on handwritten Latin and Chinese characters; however, other methods are developed only for Arabic character segmentation. This survey presents the description of the Arabic script characteristics with an overview on OCR systems and a comprehensive review mainly on off-line printed Arabic character segmentation techniques.