title: ASM Based Synthesis of Handwritten Arabic Text Pages.
abstract: Document analysis tasks, as text recognition, word spotting, or segmentation, are highly dependent on comprehensive and suitable databases for training and validation. However their generation is expensive in sense of labor and time. As a matter of fact, there is a lack of such databases, which complicates research and development. This is especially true for the case of Arabic handwriting recognition, that involves different preprocessing, segmentation, and recognition methods, which have individual demands on samples and ground truth. To bypass this problem, we present an efficient system that automatically turns Arabic Unicode text into synthetic images of handwritten documents and detailed ground truth. Active Shape Models (ASMs) based on 28046 online samples were used for character synthesis and statistical properties were extracted from the IESK-arDB database to simulate baselines and word slant or skew. In the synthesis step ASM based representations are composed to words and text pages, smoothed by B-Spline interpolation and rendered considering writing speed and pen characteristics. Finally, we use the synthetic data to validate a segmentation method. An experimental comparison with the IESK-arDB database encourages to train and test document analysis related methods on synthetic samples, whenever no sufficient natural ground truthed data is available.
authors: Institute for Information Technology and Communications (IIKT), Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, 39016 Magdeburg, Germany.
authors: Laslo
authors: L
authors: Dinges
authors: Institute for Information Technology and Communications (IIKT), Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, 39016 Magdeburg, Germany.
authors: Ayoub
authors: A
authors: Al-Hamadi
authors: Institute for Information Technology and Communications (IIKT), Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, 39016 Magdeburg, Germany.
authors: Moftah
authors: M
authors: Elzobi
authors: Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah 21421, Saudi Arabia ; Faculty of Computers and Information, Menoufia University MUFIC, Menofia 32721, Egypt.
authors: Sherif
authors: S
authors: El-Etriby
authors: Department of Software Engineering, College of Computer Science and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11451, Saudi Arabia ; Department of Computer Science, College of Science, Menoufia University, Menofia 32721, Egypt.
authors: Ahmed
authors: A
authors: Ghoneim