M. Khemakhem and A. Belghith
Arabic cursive OCR, the DTW algorithm, P2P grid computing, SRTG, experimental study
Arabic cursive optical character recognition (OCR) based on the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm provides simultaneously very interesting segmentation and recognition rates. However, the computing complexity of the DTW algorithm restricts its widespread utilization and its consideration at a commercial scale. Accelerating
the DTW execution time has attracted many researchers and several solutions have already been proposed. These solutions are commonly based on very specialized processors and hardware architectures and as such they remain very expensive and not amenable to a large scale utilization. In a previous work, we found that loosely coupled architectures can indeed provide viable infrastructures to implement a distributed Arabic OCR. Our objective here is to allow the recognition of huge quantities of Arabic documents such as those of certain national libraries. Undoubtedly, enough processing power and storage capabilities are needed. In this paper, we proposed and used a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture using the scientific research Tunisian grid (SRTG). Conducted experiments testify that our proposed architecture provides very adequate speedups of the DTW-based Arabic OCR.