A new algorithm for machine printed Arabic character segmentation

The major problem with machine printed Arabic character segmentation is the shape of the letter depending on its location in the word. In this paper, a new machine printed Arabic character segmentation algorithm, which is based on the vertical histogram and some rules, is presented. The rules which are based on, not only the structural characteristics between background regions and character components but also the characteristics of isolated Arabic characters, are used to check whether the sub-word includes only one character. Then we use the vertical histogram and some other rules to find real segmentation points. Finally, we split the sub-word at the segmentation points. The experimental results show that the algorithm achieved about 94% correct segmentation.