Recently, deep learning techniques demonstrated efficiency in building better performing machine learning models which are required in the field of offline Arabic handwriting recognition. Our ancient civilizations presented valuable handwritten manuscripts that need to be documented digitally. If we compared between Latin and the isolated Arabic character recognition, the latter is much more challenging due to the similarity between characters, and the variability of the writing styles. This paper proposes a multistage cascading system to serve the field of offline Arabic handwriting recognition. The approach starts with applying the Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) technique to split the database into partially interrelated clusters. The interrelations between the constructed clusters support representing the database as a big search tree model and help to attain a reduced complexity in matching each test image with a cluster. Cluster members are then ranked based on our new proposed ranking algorithm. This ranking algorithm starts with computing Pyramid Histogram of Oriented Gradients (PHoG), and is followed by measuring divergence by Kullback-Leibler method. Eventually, the classification process is applied only to the highly ranked matching classes. A comparative study is made to assess the effect of six different deep Convolution Neural Networks (DCNNs) on the final recognition rates of the proposed system. Experiments are done using the IFN/ENIT Arabic database. The proposed clustering and ranking stages lead to using only 11% of the whole database in classifying test images. Accordingly, more reduced computation complexity and more enhanced classification results are achieved compared to recent existing systems. INDEX TERMS Agglomerative hierarchical clustering, deep convolutional neural network, Kullback-Leibler divergence, offline arabic handwritting recognition, pyramid histogram of gradients.

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