In this paper we present a new database for off-line Arabic handwriting recognition, together with several preprocessing procedures. We designed, collected and stored a database of Arabic handwriting (AHDB). This resulted in a unique databases dealing with handwritten information from Arabic text, both in terms of the size of the database as well as the number of different writers involved. We further designed an innovative, simple, yet powerful, in place tagging procedure for the database. It enables us to extract at will the bitmaps of words. We also built a preprocessing class, which contains some useful preprocessing operations. In this paper, the most popular words in Arabic writing were found for the first time using a specially designed program.

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[23] Zimmermann M., “The Homepage of the IAM Database,” On-line reference, http://iamwww. unibe.ch/~zimmerma/iamdb/iamdb.html, 2002. Somaya Al-Ma’adeed is a PhD student at the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Nottingham, UK. She received her BSc in computer science from Qatar University and MSc in mathematics and computing from Alexandria University, Egypt. Previously, she worked as an assistant teacher at Qatar University. Her main interest is in Arabic handwritten recognition. Dave Elliman is a professor of applied computing at the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Nottingham, UK. His main interests are document recognition especially graphics symbols and linework, hand-printed character and cursive script recognition, classifiers and neuro-fuzzy systems, genetic algorithms and swarm intelligence, financial modelling, knowledge reresentation and ontologies. Colin Higgins is a senior lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Nottingham, UK. His main interests are in cursive script recognition, pen computing and a multi-modal intelligent design aid via the designers apprentice project.