2017 International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology

A Holistic Approach for Recognition of Complete

Urdu Ligatures using Hidden Markov Models
Israr Uddin∗ , Imran Siddiqi∗ and Shehzad Khalid∗
∗ Center of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan
Email: imran.siddiqi@bahria.edu.pk

Abstract—Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is one of the

continuously explored problems. Presently, commercial character
recognizers are available reporting near to 100% recognition
rates on text in a number of scripts. Despite these advancements,
OCR systems however, have yet to mature for cursive scripts like
Urdu. This study presents a holistic technique for recognition
of Urdu text in Nastaliq font using ‘complete’ ligatures as
recognition units. The term ‘complete’ refers to a partial word
including its main body and secondary components (dots and
diacritic marks). Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is employed
as feature extractor while a separate Hidden Markov Model
(HMM) is trained for each ligature considered in our study.
More than 2000 frequently used unique Urdu ligatures from the
standard CLE (Center of Language Engineering) dataset are
considered in our evaluations. The system reads a promising
accuracy of 88.87% on more than 10,000 partial words.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a classical pat-
tern recognition problem that has witnessed more than three
decades of intensive research. Thanks to these research en-
deavors, mature recognition systems realizing accuracies up
to 99.9% [10] have been developed for many scripts, those
based on Chinese and Latin alphabet for instance. In spite
of these tremendous advancements, recognition systems for
cursive scripts like Urdu are still in early days of research
and relatively limited literature is available till date. Urdu
is mostly printed in Nastaliq style which is more complex
as compared to the Naskh style of Arabic and Pashto. The
bidirectional Nastaliq writing style is highly cursive and is
diagonally written from right-to-left with varying inter and
intra word spaces. Overlapping strokes, incorrect or filled
loops and absence of static baseline represent few of the
commonly encountered challenges [14], [16], [23]. Figure 1
illustrates the complexities of Urdu Nastaliq font making it a
challenging recognition problem. With the digital revolution,
the importance of automatic recognition systems has increased
manifolds enabling the huge collections of printed, hand-
written or mixed documents to be digitized without manual
transcription.
This paper presents a global transformational method to
recognize complete Urdu ligatures. A complete or true ligature
is composed of either a single character or a combination of
characters (up to 10 [17]) and may correspond to a complete
word or a partial word. Moreover, a complete ligature may
comprise two types of components. The larger component
Fig. 1. Text having (a) Intra-ligature overlap and (b) Inter-ligatures overlap
(c) False (green) and filled (red) loops (d) Missing fixed baseline (e) and
variable spacing indicating the high cursiveness
representing the main body of the ligature is generally termed
as base or primary ligature while the smaller components rep-
resenting dots and diacritics are known as secondary ligatures.
Figure 2 illustrates the primary and secondary ligatures con-
stituting a complete ligature. It is interesting to note that more
often, a number of complete ligatures have indifferent base
ligature and different secondary ligatures depending on their
number, shape and position. Consequently, a major proportion
of recognition techniques which employ ligatures as units of
recognition carry out separate classification of primary and
secondary ligatures [6], [14], [16], [28], [29], [30] with the
aim to reduce number of unique recognizable (shape) classes.
Such techniques face the challenge to re-associate secondary
ligatures with their primary ligature to recognize the complete
ligature. While high recognition rates have been reported on
individual recognition of base and secondary ligatures, most
of the studies [7], [14], [16], [28] ignore the re-association
step and do not report the recognition rates on complete
ligatures. Consequently, the reported recognition rates are not
a true indicative of the maturity of the proposed recognition
systems once it comes to acceptability from the view point of
commercial recognition engines. This study targets recognition
of complete ligatures; rather than separately recognizing the

0-7695-6347-3/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 155

DOI 10.1109/FIT.2017.00035
primary and secondary ligatures, we train models on complete
ligatures. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is employed
as feature extractor while classification is carried out using
hidden Markov models. Evaluations on the benchmark CLE
dataset report interesting recognition rates.
Fig. 2. (a) A complete ligature (b) Primary component and (c) Secondary
components
The paper organization is as follows. The next section
reviews notable contributions to recognition of Urdu text
followed by a detailed discussion on the proposed technique in
Section III. Section IV presents the details of the experiments
carried out to validate the introduced methodology with a
discussion on the realized results. At the end, Section V
concludes the paper with a discussion on the future of Urdu
OCR.
II. L ITERATURE R EVIEW
Initial studies on recognition of Urdu text primarily focused
on classification of individual segmented characters [3], [19],
[25], [30], [32], [33]. The problem, however, has witnessed
significant research endeavors during the last five years and
a number of sophisticated ligature and character recognition
systems have been proposed [7], [12], [16], [20], [21], [28],
[35]. The recognition methods can be grouped as two major
classes, analytical and holistic methods, as discussed in the
following.
A. Analytical Methods
Analytical (also called segmentation-based) approaches
employ characters as recognition units which are segmented
either implicitly [20], [21], [22] or explicitly [2], [3], [18],
[25], [32], [33], [35]. Among well-known analytical methods,
Hussain et al. [11] adopted an explicit segmentation-based
approach for recognition of printed Urdu Nastaliq ligatures.
Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients extracted from
graphemes of ligatures are employed for training individual
HMMs for the ligature classes. The primary (segmented
into graphemes) and secondary ligatures are individually
recognized that are post processed for association. The
system reports 87.76% complete ligature recognition rate
for almost 93,000 test words from the CLE data set. A
recent trend in analytical recognition approaches is implicit
segmentation of characters using deep learning techniques.
These methods rely on feeding a classifier with text line
images and the corresponding character level transcription.
Among such techniques, Ahmed et al. [4] employed raw
pixels based bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (LSTM)
for classification of characters. The system achieves 89%
accuracy on the Urdu Printed Text Images (UPTI) dataset.
Likewise, Naz et al. [20], [21] investigated the effectiveness
156
of statistical features with multi-dimensional LSTM reporting
a character recognition rate of 96.40% on the UPTI dataset.
The work was later extended [22] to employ Convolutional
Neural Networks (CNN) for automatic feature extraction.
The combination CNN+MDLSTM reported a high character
recognition rate of 98%.
A key attraction in analytical methods is the smaller number
of unique classes to be recognized which is same as the
number of characters and their different shapes (as a function
of their position in the ligature). A major issue in analyti-
cal approaches is segmentation into characters which is an
extremely challenging task for a cursive script like Nastaliq.
Though implicit segmentation based techniques [4], [21], [22]
overcome this issue and report high recognition rates, these
techniques rely on huge amount of training data for acceptable
results.
B. Holistic Methods
Holistic (or segmentation-free) methods consider ligatures
as units of recognition and represent a major proportion of
research on Urdu OCR systems [5], [6], [12], [14], [16], [19],
[28], [29], [30], [31]. Among significant holistic techniques,
Javed et al. [12] carry out recognition of primary components
using HMM classifier. A sliding window scans the ligature
image for extraction of DCT features which are fed to the
HMMs. The system trained over 1282 primary components
reported an accuracy of 92% on 3655 query ligatures. The
technique ignores secondary components and is also font
size dependent. In another study, Sabbour and Shafait [28]
employed shape descriptors with a nearest neighbor classifier
to recognize ligatures. The system realized 86.7% accuracy
for 10,000 primary ligatures extracted from Urdu Printed
Text Images (UPTI) dataset. Akram et al. [7] modified the
Tesseract engine to recognize Urdu ligatures in Nastaliq font.
The system trained on 1475 primary components realized
a recognition rate of around 97% for font sizes 14 and 16.
The system, however, ignores secondary components and
requires a separate training step for each font size. This
issue was addressed in a later study [6] by the same authors
realizing 86.15% complete ligature recognition rates on
query ligatures extracted from 224 printed Urdu documents.
Another segmentation-free and size invariant recognition
technique is presented in [16] for individually recognizing
main and secondary ligatures. Statistical features extracted
using sliding windows are used for training individual HMMs
for the ligature classes. The system trained on 2028 unique
(primary and secondary) ligatures reports 97.93% accuracy
on 6084 test ligatures.
A major advantage of holistic approaches is that
segmentation of ligatures into characters is not required.
This, however, increases the number of unique classes to be
recognized to the total number of unique ligatures which
naturally is much larger than the total number of characters
(and their shape variants) in the alphabet. Nevertheless, this
can be addressed by enhancing the feature extraction and
classification steps.
A summarized review of well-known contributions towards
the development of an Urdu OCR system is presented in
Table I. Though high classification rates are reported by
the techniques based on implicit segmentation using deep
learning [20], [21], [22], these techniques require a mass
of data for system training. Moreover, the realized character
recognition accuracies (instead of the natural recognition unit -
ligature) are computed by edit distance between the predicted
and ground truth transcription of text lines. It is important to
discuss that character recognition rates and ligature recognition
rates are not directly comparable. Error in a single character
within a ligature results in rejection of the complete ligature.
As an example, consider two query ligatures each having five
characters. Assuming the scenario where one character is not
recognized correctly, the character recognition rate would be
90% (9/10) while the ligature recognition rate for this scenario
would be 50% (1/2). Consequently, from the view point of
eventual recognition machines, the importance of ligature
recognition accuracy gets more pronounced as opposed to
character recognition accuracy. As discussed earlier, majority
of the ligature based techniques [7], [14], [16] employ individ-
ual recognition of primary and secondary ligatures ignoring its
complex association problem. Only the techniques presented
in [6], [9], [11] consider recognition of complete ligatures
realizing recognition rates of 87.15%, 87.76% and 92.26%
respectively. Moreover, the first two studies are evaluated
over CLE dataset while the last one is tested over the UPTI
database. It is also important to note that CLE database is
much more challenging as compared to the UPTI database.
UPTI database comprises synthetically generated Urdu text
lines while CLE database has been developed by scanning
the printed Urdu documents and better imitates the documents
likely to be encountered in practical recognition problems.
III. P ROPOSED M ETHODOLOGY
This section discusses the proposed methodology for recog-
nition of complete ligatures. The technique relies on a holistic
approach where features extracted from the ligatures (without
separating primary and secondary components) are employed
to train hidden Markov models for each of the ligature classes.
As discussed earlier, a complete ligature may be a single
character or combination of characters connected together via
joiner rules. Characters in the Urdu alphabet can be separated
as joiners and non-joiners as shown in Figure 3. It should
be noted that Urdu has a large number of unique ligatures
(26,000 approximately) [17]. From the view point of frequency
of usage, a major proportion of the ligatures are very rarely
employed. It has been shown that as a function probability of
usage, around 2300 unique primary and secondary ligatures
can cover more than 99% of Urdu corpus [17]. Center of Lan-
guage Engineering (CLE), Pakistan, has compiled a collection
of 2,017 High Frequency Ligatures (HFLs) that covers a major
proportion of the Urdu corpus. The present system has been
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investigated on the same dataset. The training and recognition
steps of the system are discussed in the following.
Fig. 3. (a) Joiners and (b) Non-joiners Urdu characters
A. System Training
Training involves making the models learn to discriminate
between different ligature classes. In our study, we con-
sider 2,017 high frequency ligature clusters from the CLE
database [1]. Each ligature cluster comprises 35 sample images
of the respective ligature. 30 images of each class are used in
the training set while 5 images of each class constitute the test
set making a total of 10,085 (2017 × 5) query ligatures in the
test set.
1) Feature Extraction: Feature extraction transforms the
objects under study (ligatures in our case) to a representation
space where objects of same class group together to form
clusters. Features are generally categorized into structural and
statistical features which can be extracted at local or global
levels. Although structural features are rich in representation
of objects, these features are expensive to compute as well
as to compare (matching step). Statistical features, which
represent certain statistics calculated from images under study,
are efficient to compute and rich classifiers are also available to
compare two objects using statistical measures. We, therefore,
employ statistical features computed from ligature images
to train the HMMs. Traditionally, HMMs are trained using
features extracted through sliding windows [16]. Such smaller
units of feature extraction can be sensitive to minor shape
variations and eventually affect the recognition rates. We have
chosen a global feature extraction method where the feature
vectors of the complete ligature images are fed to the HMMs.
The ligature image is normalized to a fixed size of N × N
and two dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)
coefficients are computed representing complete ligature as a
feature vector with dimension N/2 × N/2. Figure 4 illustrates
the application of DWT to a ligature image for N = 32. The
impact of the value of N on the overall classification rates is
presented later in the paper. The DWT coefficients extracted
from the ligature images are fed to the HMMs for training as
discussed in the following.
Fig. 4. DWT computation: (a) Original image (b) DWT image
 TABLE I
S UMMARY OF U RDU T EXT R ECOGNITION S YSTEMS

Method Investigation Dataset Classification Unit of Recognition Accuracy

Analytical Pal and Sarkar [25] Custom — Isolated characters 97.80%
Analytical Shamsher et al. [32] Custom Neural Networks Isolated characters 98.30%
Analytical Ahmed et al. [3] Custom Neural networks Segmented characters 93.40%
Analytical Hussain et al. [11] CLE HMM Graphemes 87.76%
Analytical Hassan et al. [35] UPTI Bidirectional LSTM Characters 86.40%/95.80%
Analytical Ahmed et al. [4] UPTI Bidirectional LSTM Characters 89.00%
Analytical Naz et al. [20] UPTI Multi dimensional LSTM Characters 94.97%
Analytical Naz et al. [21] UPTI Multi dimensional LSTM Characters 96.40%
Analytical Naz et al. [22] UPTI CNN and Multi dimensional LSTM Characters 98.12%
Holistic Sabbour and Shafait [28] UPTI KNN 10,000 Non-unique primary components 86.70%
Holistic Din et al [9] UPTI HMM 1,526 unique primary and secondary components 92.26%
Holistic Javed et al. [12] CLE HMM 1,282 unique primary components 92.00%
Holistic Akram et al. [7] CLE HMM 1,475 unique primary components 97.87%
Holistic Akram et al. [6] CLE HMM 1,475 unique primary & secondary components 86.15%
Holistic Javed and Hussain [14] CLE HMM 1,692 unique primary components 92.73%
Holistic Khattak et al. [16] CLE HMM 2028 Unique primary and secondary components 97.93%

2) Training of Models: Hidden Markov models have been of each ligature class are used in the training set and 5 in the
successful in a wide variety of pattern classification problems test set making a total of 10,085 (complete) query ligatures.
including speech, gesture and handwriting recognition [8], Figure 6 illustrates sample ligature images from the database.
[12], [13], [15], [24], [26], [27], [34]. In our study, we The ligatures in the database comprise a minimum of one to
train a separate HMM using (training) images in each of a maximum of eight characters.
the 2,017 ligature clusters. The DWT coefficients extracted
from the images are used to train the 5 state right-to-left
HMMs (Figure 5). Since the HMMs are discrete, feature
quantization is employed (using a symbol codebook of size
50) and, the training is carried out using the standard Baum-
Welch algorithm. Once trained, the Unicode of each ligature
Fig. 6. Sample ligature images in the CLE database
is associated with the respective model.

Fig. 5. 5 State HMM employed in our study
B. Recognition of Ligatures
For recognition, the DWT coefficients of the query ligature
image are fed to each of the trained models. The model
that reports the highest probability of producing the observed
sequence (feature vector) is chosen and the associated Unicode
is written to a text file in the UTF-8 format.
IV. E XPERIMENTS AND R ESULTS
A. Recognition Results
In order to report stable recognition rates, experiments
are carried out using 7-fold cross validation with the 30/5
distribution in the training and test sets for each ligature
class. The reported recognition rates represent the average of
the 7 runs. The system realizes an overall complete ligature
recognition rate of 88.87% on the 10,085 query ligatures. We
also computed the recognition rates on the basis of number of
characters in the ligature. The realized results are summarized
in Table II. With the exception of 8-character ligatures (4 such
ligatures in the database), the recognition rates corresponding
to different number of characters per ligature are more or
less stable with an average recognition rate of around 89%
which indeed is promising considering the fact that the system
recognizes complete (primary+secondary) ligatures.
TABLE II
L ENGTH - WISE RESPECTIVE COMPLETE LIGATURE RECOGNITION RATES

This section presents the details of the experiments carried Ligature’s Constituent Characters Query Complete Ligatures Correctly Recognized Accuracy
Single character Ligatures 165 136 82.42%
out to study the effectiveness of the proposed recognition Two character ligatures 709 611 86.18%
Three character ligatures 2834 2534 89.41%
technique. We also investigate the evolution of performance Four character ligatures 3798 3391 89.28%
Five character ligatures 1914 1696 88.61%
with respect to system parameters and compare the realized Six character ligatures 560 510 91.07%
results with the latest recognition systems proposed for Urdu Seven character ligatures
Eight character ligatures
85
20
70
15
82.35%
75.00%
text. As discussed earlier, the 2,017 high frequency ligatures Total ligatures 10,085 8,963 88.87%

of the CLE database are used in our experiments. 30 images

158
B. Performance Sensitivity to System Parameters
To evaluate the stability of system performance as a function
of different parameters, we carried out experiments on the first
500 ligatures of the dataset. These parameters include HMM
states, size of the image and size of the HMM codebook.
Figure 7 illustrates the recognition rates by varying the number
of states in the HMMs while Figure 8 reports recognition
rates as a function of image size for computation of DWT.
The performance seems to be stable with respect to these
parameters where highest recognition rates are realized for a
ligature size of 32 × 32 with 5 states in the HMMs.
Fig. 7. Performance evolution as a function of HMM states (Image size fixed
to 32 × 32)
Fig. 8. Performance evolution with respect to Image Size (HMM states fixed
to 5)
Unlike image size and number of HMM states, the recog-
nition performance is more sensitive to the size of codebook
to quantify the feature vectors. These results are summarized
in Figure 9 where a codebook of size 50 reports the highest
recognition rate.
Fig. 9. Performance evolution as a function of codebook size (HMM states:
5, Image size: 32 × 32)
159
C. Comparison with Recent Works
As discussed in Section II, a number of Urdu OCR sys-
tems proposed in the literature either work on segmented
characters [3], [14], [19], [25], [35] or carry out individual
recognition of primary and secondary components [7], [12],
[16] ignoring the difficult part of associating the two. The
recent deep learning based systems [20], [21], [22], [35]
relying on implicit segmentation report character recognition
rates (on synthetic UPTI database) which cannot be directly
compared with ligature recognition rates as already elaborated.
Table III provides a comparative overview of the recognition
systems evaluated on the (more challenging) CLE database
and employing ligatures as units of recognition. While the
works reported in [7], [12], [14], [16] report more than 90%
ligature recognition rates, none of these studies associates
secondary ligatures with their primary ligatures. Only the
system proposed in [6] considers recognition of complete
ligatures reporting a recognition rate of 87.15% on 1475
unique ligatures. Our technique reports a better recognition
rate of 88.87% using 2,017 unique ligatures. A recent work
by Hussain et al. [11] also considers the recognition of
complete ligatures reporting an average accuracy of 87.76%.
The system, however, is not evaluated on the same set of
ligatures and hence the results are not directly comparable.
V. C ONCLUSION
This paper presented a holistic technique for recognition
of complete Urdu ligatures in Nastaliq font. The technique
relies on extracting DWT coefficients from ligature images
and training a separate HMM for each ligature class. A total
of 2,017 highly frequent unique ligatures from the standard
CLE database are considered in our study. Evaluations under a
number of interesting experimental settings report high recog-
nition rates outperforming the existing techniques evaluated
using the same protocol. In our further work on this problem,
we intend to consider recognition of complete page images
of Urdu text which naturally will require preprocessing and
segmentation (into lines and subsequently into ligatures) steps.
Although significant research has been carried out on this
problem in the recent years, end-to-end Urdu text recognition
systems realizing acceptable recognition rates for commercial
products are still many years down the road. The next step
would be to address the more challenging Urdu handwriting
recognition problem which has not yet been explored at all.
This, in turn, would also require development of standard
handwriting databases similar to the printed UPTI and CLE
datasets. Concluding, the problem of Urdu OCR and Urdu
handwriting recognition offers a number of exciting challenges
to the document analysis and recognition community for many
years to come.
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 TABLE III
P ERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF LIGATURE BASED RECOGNITION TECHNIQUES
Study Unique ligatures Accuracy Recognition of Complete Ligatures
Javed et al. [12] 1282 92.00%
Akram et al. [7] 1475 97.87%
Javed and Hussain [14] 1692 92.73%
Khattak et al. [16] 2028 97.93%
Akram et al. [6] 1475 87.15%
Proposed 2017 88.87%
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