Holistic approach for classifying and retrieving personal Arabic handwritten documents

This paper presents a novel holistic technique for classifying and retrieving Arabic handwritten text documents. The retrieval of Arabic handwritten documents is performed in several steps. First, the Arabic handwritten document images are segmented into words, and then each word is segmented into its connected parts. Second, several features are extracted from these connected parts and then combined to represent a word with one consolidated feature vector. Finally, a generalized feedforward neural network is used to learn and classify the different styles/fonts into word classes, which are used to retrieve Arabic handwritten text documents.