Improving Handwritten Arabic Character Recognition by Modeling Human Handwriting Distortions

Handwritten Arabic character recognition systems face several challenges, including the unlimited variation in human handwriting and the unavailability of large public databases of handwritten characters and words. The use of synthetic data for training and testing handwritten character recognition systems is one of the possible solutions to provide several variations for these characters and to overcome the lack of large databases. While this can be using arbitrary distortions, such as image noise and randomized affine transformations, such distortions are not realistic. In this work, we model real distortions in handwriting using real handwritten Arabic character examples and then use these distortion models to synthesize handwritten examples that are more realistic. We show that the use of our proposed approach leads to significant improvements across different machine-learning classification algorithms.