128 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 10 1. INTRODUCTION Character Recognition (CR) is an area of Pat- tern Recognition that has always been active for research. CR automation means translating im- ages of characters into an editable text. In other words, it represents an attempt to simulate the human reading process. Handwritten character recognition is a very challenging task due to the existence of many difficulties such as the high variability of the handwritten styles and shapes, uncertainty of human writing, skew or slanting issues, segmentation of the words into characters and the size of the lexicon. The problem of handwriting recognition (HWR) can be classified into two main groups, off-line and on-line recognition, according to the format of handwriting inputs. In offline recogni- Hanan Aljuaid University Technology Malaysia, Malaysia Dzulkifli Mohamad University Technology Malaysia, Malaysia Muhammad Sarfraz Kuwait University, Kuwait Evaluation Approach of Arabic Character Recognition ABSTRACT This paper proposes and contributes towards designing a complete system for of-line Arabic character recognition. The proposed system is specifcally meant for Arabic handwriting recognition, but it equally works for the typed character recognition. It has various phases including preprocessing and segmenta- tion. It also includes thinning phase and fnds vertical and horizontal projection profles. The recognition phase is managed by genetic algorithm. The genetic algorithm stands on feature extraction algorithm that defnes six features for each segment. The algorithm, for Arabic handwriting recognition, obtained 90.46 recognition rate. The proposed system has been compared with other systems in the literature. It has achieved the second best recognition rate. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-3906-5.ch010