Off line Arabic character recognition: a survey

Machine simulation of human reading has been the subject of intensive research for almost three decades. A large number of research papers and reports have already been published on Latin, Chinese and Japanese characters. However, little work has been conducted on the automatic recognition of Arabic characters because of the complexity of printed and handwritten text, and this problem is still an open research field. The main objective of this paper is to present the state of Arabic character recognition research throughout the last two decades.