Recent advances of ML and DL approaches for Arabic handwriting recognition: A review

Abstract

Handwritten text recognition remains a popular area of research. An analysis of these techniques is more necessary. This article is practically interested in a bibliographic study on existing recognition systems with the aim of motivating researchers to look into these techniques and try to develop more advanced ones. It presents a detailed comparative study carried out on some Arabic handwritten character recognition techniques using holistic, analytical and a segmentation-free approaches. In this study, first, we show the difference between different recognition approaches: deep learning vs machine learning. Secondly, a description of the Arabic handwriting recognition process regrouping pre-processing, feature extraction and segmentation was presented. Then, we illustrate the main techniques used in the field of handwriting recognition and we make a synthesis of these methods.