Offline Arabic handwritten word recognition: A transfer learning approach

Offline Arabic handwritten word recognition is still a challenging task. Many deep learning approaches perform admirably on this task if the lexicon size is not too large and the number of training samples is sufficient for the training process. The transfer learning technique is commonly used to compensate for the lack of training samples, but there is a wide controversy about the effectiveness of applying it to cross-domain tasks. In this paper, we examine the performance of three deep convolution neural networks that have been randomly initialized for recognizing Arabic handwritten words. Then, we evaluate the performance of the ResNet18 model that has been pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset for the same task. Finally, we propose an approach based on sequentially transferring the mid-level word image representations through two consecutive phases using the ResNet18 model. We carried out four different sets of experiments using two popular offline Arabic handwritten word datasets: the AlexU-W and the IFN/ENIT (v2.0p1e) to figure out the most effective way of applying transfer learning. Our results demonstrate that using the ImageNet as a source dataset improves the recognition accuracy of the ten frequently misclassified words in the IFN/ENIT dataset by 14%, while our proposed approach gives a rise of 35.45%. In the whole dataset, we achieved recognition accuracy up to 96.11%, which is nearly a 2.5% enhancement compared with other state-of-the-art methods. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).