Arabic script based character segmentation: a review

Segmentation based Arabic script based languages character recognition has been a popular field of research for many years. The challenging nature of Arabic script recognition has attracted the attention of researchers from both industry and academic circles but these efforts have not achieved good results until now. Segmentation of Urdu script when written in Nasta'liq writing style is very difficult task due to the complexity of writing style as compare to Naskh writing style. Good segmentation is one of reasons for high accuracy. Character segmentation has been a critical phase of the OCR process. The higher recognition rates for isolated characters as compare to results of words or connected character well illustrate the importance of segmentation. Current study investigate the recent work for character segmentation and challenges for segmentation for Arabic script based languages. © 2013 IEEE.