Abstract
Sub-character HMM models for Arabic text recognition allow sharing of common patterns between different position-dependent shape forms of an Arabic character as well as between different characters. The number of HMMs gets reduced considerably while still capturing the variations in shape patterns. This results in a compact, efficient, and robust recognizer with reduced model set. In the current paper we are presenting our recent improvements in sub-character HMM modeling for Arabic text recognition where we use special 'connector' and 'space' models. Additionally we investigated contextual sub-characters HMMs for text recognition. We also present multi-stream contextual sub-character HMMs where the features calculated from a sliding window frame form one stream and its derivative features are part of the second stream. We report state-of-the-art results on the IFN/ENIT (benchmark) database of handwritten Arabic text and the recognition rate of 85.12% on sets outperforms previously published results.