RESTORATION OF TEMPORAL INFORMATION IN OFF-LINE ARABIC HANDWRITING

An algorithm is developed in order to restore the temporal information in off-line Arabic handwriting so that on-line recognition algorithms may be used to advantage. Firstly, the secondary strokes that touch t he main stroke are segmented and the start and end vertices of the mai n stroke are determined. Secondly, the subword is traversed from the s tart vert'' to the end vertex by solving the Chinese postman's problem for the subword graph. Special rules are applied in order to restore the temporal information in the subword and to obtain a traversal cons istent with Arabic handwriting. A subword representation is suggested such that the subword features are implied and can be easily extracted . A total of 1605 strokes, freely written by two writers, are used to test the algorithms and a high rate of restoration of temporal informa tion is obtained.