An Effective Combination of Convolutional Neural Network and Support Vector Machine Classifier for Arabic Handwritten Recognition

Recognition of handwritten Arabic characters remains a major challenge for researchers, given the significant differences in handwriting. This paper presents a hybrid method based on combining the most efficient classification techniques. A trained convolutional neural network (CNN) was applied to extract features from character images. Then, a support vector machine (SVM) was used for classification. By combining CNN and SVM, the aim is to exploit both technologies’ strengths. Four hybrid models are proposed in this work. Several databases such as HACDB, HIJJA, AHCD, and MNIST were used to evaluate them. The results obtained are satisfactory compared to similar studies in the literature, with a test accuracy of 89.7, 88.8, 97.3, and 99.4%, respectively.