Preprocessing and Structural Feature Extraction for a
Multi-Fonts Arabic / Persian OCR
Mandana Kavianifar
School of Computer Science and Engineering
University of New South Wales, Sydney
NSW 2052, Australia
mandanak@cse.unsw.edu.au amin@cse.unsw.edu.au
Abstract
English and Chinese are languages, which have
tremendously attracted interests of character recognition
researchers. In contrast, research in the field of
character recognition for Arabic / Persian scripts face
major problems mainly related to the unique
characteristics of these two like being cursive, multiple
shapes of one character in different positions in a word
and connectivity of characters on the baseline. The
proposed work consists of three major phases. After
digitizing the text, the original image is transformed into
a gray scale image using a 300-dpi scanner. Different
steps of preprocessing are then applied on the image file.
In the next phase, sub-words of all words are recognized
and global features for each word are extracted. Contour
tracing plays a very important role in the phase of
feature extraction.
1. Introduction
Character recognition as one of the most important
fields of pattern recognition has been the center of
attention for researchers in the last four decades. The
modern version of OCR appeared in the middle of
1940’s with the development of the digital computers[1].
Since then several character recognition systems for
English, Chinese and Japanese characters have been
proposed [12]-[14]. However, development of character
recognition systems for other languages such as Arabic
and Persian hasn’t had such a fast trend.
Arabic is the official language of all countries in
North Africa and most of the countries in the Middle
East and it is the sixth most commonly used language in
the world. In addition, Farsi or Persian with almost 90
million speakers (the official language of Iran, also
spoken in Afghanistan), Kurdi, Pashto and Urdu are all
written using modified Arabic alphabets [8], [2].
These figures support the fact that slow
advancement in Arabic/Persian OCRs is not because they
Adnan Amin
are not important or alive languages but technical
difficulties due to special characteristics of these scripts,
have caused the problem. These unique characteristics
can be categorized as :
• Arabic / Persian script (hand written or printed) is
cursive and letters normally connected to each other
on an imaginary line called baseline. Hence,
separation of the characters from each other in this
kind of script is a difficult task.
• Each letter in Arabic/Persian script can have two to
four different shapes within a word (at the
beginning, in the middle, at the end or stand-alone).
Figure 1 shows these four different positions for the
character ”AIN”. This fact increases the characters
to be recognized from 28 (for Persian 32) to 100 (for
Persian 114).
• Arabic/Persian is written and read from right to left.
Figure 1. Four different shapes of character
“AIN”. From left to right: stand alone, at the end,
in the middle and at the beginning
• Most letters have one, two or three dots that can be
positioned above, below or inside them (Figure 2).
In several characters, the characters’ main shapes are
the same and only number and position of dots make
them different. Hamzah (zigzag) also has this
characteristic. Dot and Hamzah are called
“complementary characters”.
• An Arabic/Persian word is composed of a number of
portions which are named “sub-word” in this paper.
A sub-word comprises one stand-alone character or
a group of connected characters. See Figure 3.

(a) (b) (c)
Figure 2. Three different Arabic characters.
(a) 1 dot below, (b) 1 dot in the middle, (c ) 3
dots above the character
(a) (b) ( c)
Figure 3. Three Arabic words. (a) contains one
sub-word with 4 characters, (b) contains three
sub-words with 1,1 and 2 characters
respectively, (c) contains two sub-words with 2
and 2 characters
Due to these major differences between Arabic/Persian
and Latin or Chinese scripts, proposed methods for the
latter are not suitable for the former. Single researches in
this subject did not start until the early 1980’s. IRAC,
which was suggested by Amin et al. [3] used a structural
classification method. IRACII [4], was based on
segmentation technique. Badi and Shimura used the
concept of contour tracing and the identification of the
component cursive in their syntactic method [5]. In
another method [6] , sub-words are identified and
separated in the text. Then a histogram is used to
segment each sub-word. Mahmoud [7] adopted a
combination of Fourier descriptors and contour tracing
for Arabic characters. Contour tracing also plays a very
crucial role in the system proposed by Allam [2]. During
last five years, researchers have suggested several other
methods and for a complete literature on the subject of
Arabic OCR, the reader is referred to [9]. It must be
mentioned that Sakhr Automatic reader no-3.01 and
Shonut’s Omnipage Pro Version 2.0 are two samples of
commercially available Arabic character recognition
systems [17].
In this paper, a Multi-font Arabic/Persian character
recognition system and its major phases have been
explained. Within the paper, “Arabic” refers to both
Arabic and Persian unless it is mentioned explicitly.
2. The proposed recognition system
The proposed character recognition system for Arabic
character set is composed of the following phases:
2.1. Digitization
The first phase of this system is data acquisition,
which is done by scanning an Arabic text with 300 dpi
resolution. The input file for the system is a gray scale
PGM-formatted file, so any other format of grayscale is
converted and then used as an input file. Gray scale
image files cover more pixels of the original image than
binary images, so the file provides more information
about it. Also, noise or some features like loop can be
distorted in a binary version of an image file, therefore
unlike a gray scale file, useful information is corrupted.
2.2. Preprocessing
Preprocessing (pixel level processing) on the input file
makes it ready for further processes. This major phase
includes the following steps:
2.2.1. Global thresholding. A suitable threshold among
potential thresholds is selected as a global threshold by
employing Otsu’s method [15]. Pixels with value greater
than the global threshold are assumed as background and
others as foreground pixels.
2.2.2. Connected components recognition. Connected
components (cc) are rectangular boxes bounding together
regions of connected foreground pixels. The objective of
this step is to form these rectangles around distinct
components of the input file [16].
2.2.3. Grouping. The next step is the grouping of
neighboring connected components of similar dimension.
The algorithm takes one cc at a time and tries to merge
it into a group from a set of existing groups. If it
succeeds, the group’s dimensions are altered to cater for
the new cc. If the cc can not be merged with any of the
existing group then a new group is formed with its sole
member being the cc. Figure 4 shows an Arabic word, its
connected components and group.
(a) (b) (c)
Figure 4. (a) An Arabic word, (b) Its connected
components (sub-words), (c) Its group
2.2.4. Skew detection and correction. The adopted
skew detection algorithm [11], attempts to determine the
skew angle of the entire document by calculating a skew
angle for each group. Then, skew correction algorithm is
applied on the input file.
2.3. Feature extraction
The proposed work has adopted a global approach for
character recognition and no character segmentation is
required.
2.3.1. Contour tracing. The basic step for determining
sub-words within each word is tracing the outer contours
of all its elements. Within the boundaries of each group
(representing a word) a raster scan from top to bottom
and left to right is started until the first foreground pixel
is reached. From this point, contour tracing is begun by
adopting Freeman chain code and the Left-Most-Looking
(LML) rule [7]. External and loop are two different types
of contours which are produced in this step. An Arabic
word and its contours are shown in Figure 5.
2.3.2. Contour analysis. In this step, first all the word’s
sub-words are determined and then each sub-word’s
contours are analyzed and classified. Each sub-word can
have three types of external contours: main body,
complementary character or noise. Big noises in size,
are another sort of contour that can be find in the image
file. During the digitization phase, some spurious pixels
may result in the image file . Fortunately, they are not
so big and would be recognized by their contour’s
length.
(a) (b) (c) (d ) (e)
Figure 5. (a) An Arabic word, (b) Its main body
contours (external), (c) The contour of upper dot
(external), (d) The contour of lower dot
(external), (e) The contour of loop (internal)
Two thresholds, TN and TM are set to help finding
contour’s class. If the Contour’s Length (CL) is less than
TN, the contour is considered a noise and its class gets
the value of 0. If CL >= TM, then the contour belongs to
a main body and value of 1 is assigned to the field. If
TN < CL < TM , then a complementary character’s
contour has been found and this field will have the value
of 2. At the end of this step an array of information
about contours for each word’s sub-word is built. This
array contains contour’s type, coordinates of the first
pixel of the contour, necessary information about each
pixel of the contour , contour’s length and class.
2.3.3. Sub-words detection. Another analysis on the set
of contours is begun to find a main body which
determines a sub-word. To find vertical boundaries for
this contour, two pixels of it with the largest and smallest
values of Y-coordinate must be identified. Tracing the
linked list of information about all pixels of the contour
and comparing their Y-coordinates with the current
amount of minimum and maximum does the task.
2.3.4. Detecting a Sub-word’s complementary
characters. All the contours of complementary
characters which belong to the detected sub-word should
be found. Therefore, another search is taken place
through the array to find all the external contours which
the Y coordinate of their starting points are fallen within
the two boundaries. As mentioned before, a dot can be in
a form of 1 dot, 2 or 3 dots. In some fonts, dots can be
attached together and form a bigger island.
For detecting non-attached dots, the distance between X
and Y coordinates of the starting point of their contour is
checked. If these distances were less than two certain
thresholds, the contours belong to non-attached dots and
number of contours determines type of dots (2 or 3). To
detect type of attached dots (See Figure 6), three
different methods have been designed and tested on all
available Arabic fonts for Windows. Theses methods are
conducted based on comparison of length and area of the
attached dots’ contour with different defined thresholds
and also by comparing the chain-code sequence of the
contour with certain patterns. The achieved results have
shown the third method works best among the three. In
fact the third method enables the proposed system to
work as an Omni-font OCR for all the available fonts in
Arabic for Windows word processor.
(a) (b)
Figure 6. (a), (b) Two Arabic words, each with
one 3 attached dots and one 2 attached dots
Dots in Arabic characters can be positioned under,
above or in the middle of them. Because position of dots
with respect to baseline can determine their position with
respect to character, correct detection of baseline is
important. Two different methods have been suggested
and tested for baseline detection. The tests’ results show
that the second method has been more successful than
the first one.
1. Baseline detection using contour’s chain code [10].
2. Baseline detection using horizontal projection
profile and finding a row with the largest density.
Comparing the starting point’s X coordinate with
baseline location would do determining position of dots.
2.3.5. Producing output file. At the end of feature
extraction step, an output file is produced which contains
all the information about every word in the image file.
Each line contains the following information: Name of
the word, number of sub-words, number of peaks in the
histogram of sub-word, type and position of
complementary characters and number of loops. The last
four fields are repeated for every sub-word of the word.
3. Experimental Results and Conclusion
The proposed work has been tested on some printed
Arabic words with 14 of 19 different fonts available in
Arabic for Windows (famous fonts like Naskh, Andalus,
Kufi and traditional Arabic). The system has been
developed by Microsoft Visual C++ on Windows NT
platform. Table 1 shows the result of feature extraction
phase on several sample Arabic words.
Name of Entity % of Correct
Recognized
Sub-Word 97%
One dot ~ 91%
Two dots ~78%
Three dots ~63%
Loop 100%
Table 1. Tests’ results of feature extraction
phase
Some Arabic fonts and other complex features of Arabic
script have caused poor results for the recognition of 2
and 3 dots. In these fonts contour’s length and area for 2
or 3 dots are different from most of them ,so finding
correct values for thresholds would be difficult and in
some cases impossible. Another reason for rather poor
recognition of dots is the attaching dots to main bodies in
some fonts. In these cases no contours would be traced
for dots, therefore they wouldn’t be recognized as dots at
all. The system has an excellent performance for mono
font in feature extraction phase because the problem of
attached dots together and/or to the main body doesn’t
occur. Also the behavior of the system’s algorithms are
predictable on noisy documents. The system recognizes
all the existent loops of the words.
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