An efficient algorithm for Arabic optical font recognition using scale-invariant detector

This paper proposes a new algorithm for Arabic optical font recognition (AOFR) as the first stage for Arabic optical character recognition. The proposed algorithm uses scale-invariant detector, gradient-based descriptor, and k-means clustering. The scale-invariant detector is used to find key points that identify the font of an image of printed Arabic text. The work in this paper compares between several scale-invariant detectors and selects the best one for AOFR. A gradient-based descriptor similar to the one in the famous scale-invariant feature transform algorithm is used to describe the detected key points. In addition, k-means clustering is used for font classification. In this paper, the mean recognition rate is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm shows superior performance when compared with recently published algorithms for AOFR.