Arabic words extraction and character recognition from picturesque image macros with enhanced VGG-16 based model functionality using neural networks

• Main Authors: Al-Radaideh, Ayed Ahmad Hamdan, Mohd. Rahim, Mohd. Shafry, Wad Ghaban, Wad Ghaban, Majdi Bsoul, Majdi Bsoul, Kamal, Shahid, Abbas, Naveed
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Korean Society for Internet Information 2023
• Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Online Access: http://eprints.utm.my/105193/1/AyedAhmadHamdan2023_ArabicWordsExtractionandCharacterRecognition.pdf; http://eprints.utm.my/105193/; http://dx.doi.org/10.3837/tiis.2023.07.004
• Institution: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Innovation and rapid increased functionality in user friendly smartphones has encouraged shutterbugs to have picturesque image macros while in work environment or during travel. Formal signboards are placed with marketing objectives and are enriched with text for attracting people. Extracting and recognition of the text from natural images is an emerging research issue and needs consideration. When compared to conventional optical character recognition (OCR), the complex background, implicit noise, lighting, and orientation of these scenic text photos make this problem more difficult. Arabic language text scene extraction and recognition adds a number of complications and difficulties. The method described in this paper uses a two-phase methodology to extract Arabic text and word boundaries awareness from scenic images with varying text orientations. The first stage uses a convolution auto-encoder, and the second uses Arabic Character Segmentation (ACS), which is followed by traditional two-layer neural networks for recognition. This study presents the way that how can an Arabic training and synthetic dataset be created for exemplify the superimposed text in different scene images. For this purpose a dataset of size 10K of cropped images has been created in the detection phase wherein Arabic text was found and 127k Arabic character dataset for the recognition phase. The phase-1 labels were generated from an Arabic corpus of quotes and sentences, which consists of 15kquotes and sentences. This study ensures that Arabic Word Awareness Region Detection (AWARD) approach with high flexibility in identifying complex Arabic text scene images, such as texts that are arbitrarily oriented, curved, or deformed, is used to detect these texts. Our research after experimentations shows that the system has a 91.8% word segmentation accuracy and a 94.2% character recognition accuracy. We believe in the future that the researchers will excel in the field of image processing while treating text images to improve or reduce noise by processing scene images in any language by enhancing the functionality of VGG-16 based model using Neural Networks.