Segmentation techniques for recognition of Arabic-like scripts: a comprehensive survey

Arabic script based text recognition system has been a popular field of research for many years that can be used in the learning and teaching process to the students and educators how to read and understand educational contents of Arabic script. 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 the 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 investigates the recent work for character segmentation and challenges for segmentation for Arabic script based languages.