Character recognition of cursive scripts
S. S. Hyder, A. Khoujah · 1988
A method for generating the cursive scripts of Arabic-Farsi-Urdu family of languages was developed by Hyder (1).This principle, commonly known as contextual analysis, has now become the universal standard for all input-output devices: e.g. computer terminals, teleprinters, typewriters, etc.In the present paper the inverse problem is studied and the design of a PROLOG based system is described which recognizes the printed cursive script to determin the constituent characters from which the script had been generated.The procedure described in (l) may be considered as a set of inference (production) rules of the type P -* Q, where P is a string of discrete and invariant characters of the alphabet and Q is the string of the corresponding graphemes or character shapes that are context dependent.The printed (cursive) character shape, an element in Q, may have up to six different values corresponding to a character, member of the string P.The recognition problem may be described as the inverse of the above, that is, for a given Q we determine P, by a set of inference rules of the type Q -~ P, that use pattern matching and unification in PROLOG.This approach tends to reduce the search space on the average by five orders of magnitude.The results, reported in the paper, can be used for the development of an Optical Character Recognition System for these scripts.