Arabic and farsi font recognition: Survey

Font Recognition (FR) is useful in improving optical text recognition accuracy and time. In addition, it can be used to restore the original document text fonts, styles and sizes. In this paper, we survey the literature of Arabic and Farsi FR research and used databases. The main phases of FR systems are surveyed (viz. preprocessing, classification techniques and used features). All published work of Arabic and Farsi FR, which the authors are aware of, are surveyed. To our knowledge, this is the first survey of Arabic/Farsi FR and used databases. In addition, the paper addresses the strengths and limitations of the presented techniques and specified areas of research that are not, so far, addressed in Arabic/Farsi FR as well as areas of possible improvement.