Improving Arabic handwritten text recognition through transfer learning with convolutional neural network-based models

Arabic handwritten text recognition is a complex and challenging research domain. This study proposes an offline Arabic handwritten word recognition system based on transfer learning. The system exploits four pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, namely VGG16, ResNet50, AlexNet, and InceptionV3. In addition, a specialized image recognition model derived from the ImageNet dataset is incorporated. A combination strategy is designed to combine transfer learning with specific fine-tuning techniques, aiming to improve recognition accuracy. The study is conducted on the IFN/ENIT dataset, which includes images of Tunisian City and village names. The results show that the proposed system achieves a recognition accuracy of 94.73%, which is significantly higher than the accuracy rates achieved by previous approaches. These results suggest that the proposed system is a promising approach for Arabic handwritten text recognition.