Recognition of handwritten cursive Arabic characters

An automatic off-line character recognition system for handwritten cursive Arabic characters is presented. A robust noise-independent algorithm is developed that yields skeletons that reflect the structural relationships of the character components. The character skeleton is converted to a tree structure suitable for recognition. A set of fuzzy constrained character graph models (FCCGM's), which tolerate large variability in writing, is designed. These models are graphs, with fuzzily labeled arcs used as prototypes for the characters. A set of rules is applied in sequence to match a character tree to an FCCGM. Arabic handwritings of four writers were used in the learning and testing stages. The system proved to be powerful in tolerance to variable writing, speed, and recognition rate     

Efficient iris segmentation method in unconstrained environments

Recently, iris recognition systems have gained increased attention especially in non-cooperative environments. One of the crucial steps in the iris recognition system is the iris segmentation because it significantly affects the accuracy of the feature extraction and iris matching steps. Traditional iris segmentation methods provide excellent results when iris images are captured using near infrared cameras under ideal imaging conditions, but the accuracy of these algorithms significantly decreases when the iris images are taken in visible wavelength under non-ideal imaging conditions. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed to segments iris images captured in visible wavelength under unconstrained environments. The proposed algorithm reduces the error percentage even in the presence of types of noise include iris obstructions and specular reflection. The proposed algorithm starts with determining the expected region of the iris using the K-means clustering algorithm. The Circular Hough Transform (CHT) is then employed in order to estimate the iris radius and center. A new efficient algorithm is developed to detect and isolate the upper eyelids. Finally, the non-iris regions are removed. Results of applying the proposed algorithm on UBIRIS iris image databases demonstrate that it improves the segmentation accuracy and time.     

Fuzzy state machines to recognize totally unconstructed handwritten strokes

An automatic off-line character recognition system for totally unconstrained handwritten strokes is presented. A stroke representation is developed and described using five types of feature. Fuzzy state machines are defined to work as recognizers of strokes. An algorithm to obtain a deterministic fuzzy state machine from a stroke representation, that is capable of recognizing that stroke and its variants is presented. An algorithm is developed to merge two fuzzy state machines into one machine. The use of fuzzy machines to recognize strokes is clarified through a recognition algorithm. The learning algorithm is a complex of the previous algorithms. A set of 20 stroke classes was used in the learning and recognition stages. The system was trained on 5890 unnormalized strokes written by five writers. The learning stage produced a fuzzy state machine of 2705 states and 8640 arcs. A total of 6865 unnormalized strokes, written freely by five writers other than the writers of the learning stage, was used in testing. The recognition, rejection and error rates were 94.8%, 1.2% and 4.0%, respectively. The system can be more developed to deal with cursive handwriting.     

Straight line approximation and 1D representation of off-line handwritten text

Algorithms to process off-line Arabic handwriting before recognition are presented. First, an algorithm that converts smoothed and thinned images into straight line approximations is described. Second, an algorithm is developed to obtain a 1D representation of off-line Arabic handwriting. This is achieved by first finding the start-end pair of vertices of writing. Then a stroke is traversed from the start to the end vertex by solving the Chinese postman's problem for its graph. Special rules are applied to enforce temporal information on the stroke to obtain the most likely traversal that is consistent with Arabic handwriting. Finally, an algorithm is suggested to reduce straight line approximations to other approximations in which loops are represented by vertices with features. In testing, 2256 unconstrained handwritten strokes, written by six writes, were used. In 96.5% of the samples, the algorithm restored the actual temporal information.