A Lexicon of Connected Components for Arabic Optical Text Recognition

Abstract

Arabic is a cursive script that lacks the ease of character segmentation. Hence, we suggest a unit that is discrete in nature, viz. the connected component, for Arabic text recognition. A lexicon listing valid Arabic connected components is necessary to any system that is to use such unit. Here, we produce and analyze a comprehensive lexicon of connected components. A lexicon can be extracted from corpora or synthesized from morphemes. We follow both approaches and merge their results. Besides, generation of a lexicon of connected components encompasses extra tokenization and point-normalization steps to make the size of the lexicon tractable. We produce a lexicon of surface-words, reduce it into a lexicon of connected components, and finally into a lexicon of point normalized connected components. The lexicon of point normalized connected components contains 684,743 entries, showing a percent decrease of 97.17% from the word-lexicon.