A considerable progress in recognition techniques for many non-Arabic characters has been achieved. In contrary, few efforts have been put on the research of Arabic characters. In any Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system the segmentation step is usually the essential stage in which an extensive portion of processing is devoted and a considerable share of recognition errors is attributed. In this research, a novel segmentation approach for machine Arabic printed text with diacritics is proposed. The proposed method reduces computation, errors, gives a clear description for the sub-word and has advantages over using the skeleton approach in which the data and information of the character can be lost. Both of initial evaluation and testing of the proposed method have been developed using MATLAB and shows 98.7% promising results.

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