Databases And Competitions: Strategies To Improve Arabic Recognition Systems

The great success and high recognition rates of both OCR systems and recognition systems for handwritten words are unconceivable without the availability of huge datasets of real world data. This chapter gives a short survey of datasets used for recognition with special focus on their application. The main part of this chapter deals with Arabic handwriting, datasets for recognition systems, and their availability. A description of different datasets and their usability is given, and the results of a competition are presented. Finally, a strategy for the development of Arabic handwriting recognition systems based on datasets and competitions is presented.