  In this work we propose a hybrid NN/HMM model for online Arabic handwriting
recognition. The proposed system is based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and
Multi Layer Perceptron Neural Networks (MLPNNs). The input signal is segmented
to continuous strokes called segments based on the Beta-Elliptical strategy by
inspecting the extremum points of the curvilinear velocity profile. A neural
network trained with segment level contextual information is used to extract
class character probabilities. The output of this network is decoded by HMMs to
provide character level recognition. In evaluations on the ADAB database, we
achieved 96.4% character recognition accuracy that is statistically
significantly important in comparison with character recognition accuracies
obtained from state-of-the-art online Arabic systems.8
