Ligature categorization based Nastaliq Urdu recognition using deep neural networks

The cursive nature, Nastaliq writing style and a large number of different ligatures make ligature recognition very difficult in Urdu. In this paper, we present a segmentation-free approach to holistically recognize Urdu ligatures. We first generate a rich dataset which contains 17,010 ligatures with different orientation and different degrees of noise. Secondly, the ligatures are clustered (categorized) in order to reduce the search space and...