Handheld devices generally provide the facility of text input through keys that are an inconvenient and slow way of input. Digitizing tablets and light pens, on the other hand provide a natural and convenient way of input. There are many online character recognizers for languages based on Roman and Chinese characters but there is no such commercial product for Urdu/Arabic text input. We present the design of an online Urdu handwriting recognition system that can recognize about 850 single character, 2 character and 3 character ligatures, enabling input of about 18000 common words from the Urdu Dictionary.
S. Afaq Husain, Asma Sajjad, Fareeha Anwar