Benchmark database and GUI environment for printed arabic text recognition research

This paper presents the details of a comprehensive database of Printed Arabic text for Arabic text recognition research. It consists of scanned images of different forms of Arabic printed text (viz. book chapters, advertisements, magazines, newspapers, and reports) scanned with 200, 300, and 600 dpi resolutions. A total of 6954 pages are scanned. The database may be utilized by Arabic printed text recognition research community. It may be used as a benchmark database where researchers can evaluate their algorithms and results compared with published work of other researchers using the same database. To the best of our knowledge, there is no public comprehensive printed Arabic text database that is freely available. Hence, this database may address this deficiency in Arabic printed text recognition research. This database will be made freely available to interested researchers. In addition, this paper presents a software GUI environment to make the manipulation of the created database easier. Moreover, the software GUI provides a number of imageprocessing functions that can be used in the field of automatic text recognition.