Abstract In spite of the diversity ofprintedArabicoptical characterrecognitionproductsandproposals,the problemseems tobenotyetwellsolved.Thecomplexmorphologya ndcalligraphyoftheArabicwritingononehandandtheuseofsomelight approaches on the other hand are behind the poornes s of these products. However, some strong proposedapproaches didn’t find the opportunity to be commercialised because o f generally their corresponding complex computing.  The dynamic time warping algorithm is considered as one among these strong approaches. In fact, severalstudiesandexperimentshaveshown andconfirmedthattheprintedArabicopticalchara cterrecognitionbasedondynamictimewarpingalgo rithmprovidesavery interesting recognition rate especially for large a nd huge vocabularies. One of the attractive sides o f the dynamic time warping algorithm is its ability to recognize prope rly connected or cursive characters (words or sub w ords) without prior segmentation. Furthermore, this algorithm performs the recognition process from within a reference library of isolated characters and owns a very good immunity against no ises. Unfortunately, the big amount of its computing during the recognition process makes its execution time very s low and, hence, restricts its utilization. Many researchers attempted to speedup the execution time of this algorithm. Unfor tunately, the corresponding proposed solutions requ ire generally specific high cost architectures. Loosely coupled architectu res such as grapes or grid computing can provide en ough power without additional cost to distribute the complexity of som e greedy applications. Consequently, we report in t his paper the performance analysis of an analytical and an experi mental study of a distributed Arabic optical character recognition based on the dynamic time warping algorithm within loosel y coupled architectures. Obtained results confirm that loosely coupled architectures and more specifically grid computing present a very interesting framework to speedup the  Arabic optical characterrecognitionbasedonthedynamictimewar pingalgorithm.  

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[35] Xtremweb&ch,http://www.xtremwebch.net,2000. Maher Khemakhem received his master of science and his PhD degreesfromtheUniversityofParis 11, France in 1984 and 1987, respectively. He is currently assistant professor in computer science at the Faculty of Economy and Management Sciences at the University of Sfax, Tunisia. His research interests include distributed systems, performance evaluation, and pattern recognition. Abdelfettah Belghith received his master of science and his PhD degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1982 and 1987, respectively. He is since 1992afullprofessorattheNational School of Computer Science, University of Mannouba, Tunisia. His research interests include computer networks, wireless networks, multimedia Internet, mobile computing, distributed algorithms, simulation, and performance evaluation.