Urdu Language Analysis

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is a popular language of South East Asia. It is spoken by about 250 million people across the world including around 100 to 130 million native speakers living in Pakistan and India [1]. Urdu is a very vast language with very rich literature written by a large number of famous poets and writers of old Indian sub-continent [2].
Urdu language is also one of the languages which contain the features, properties, scripts and writing styles of two languages Arabic and Persian [3]. Arabic is the base language from which the Persian is taken up and Urdu is derived from both Arabic and Persian. It`s base is also from Arabic but also contains features from Persian. The most prevalent Urdu script is blend

Cursiveness actually means different shapes of joining characters depending on the sequence of joining [4]. This cursive nature of Urdu text make the correct detection and recognition of Urdu words very difficult and challenging for image processing tasks. Moreover diacritics like zer, zabar, paish, madd are also used in Urdu text. The formation of ligature can include characters joining on both sides of neighboring characters along with those joining at only one side. The shape of the letters in Urdu text depends on the neighboring letter and its position. A letter in Urdu language may appear in different shapes depending on its position. There are four positions in which a letter may appear in Urdu text i.e. Initial, Medial, Final and Isolated [4]. Nine out of 37 standard characters in Urdu remains separate and don’t join with any character to form single ligature, thus breaks the word in to multiple ligatures [5]. The remaining 26 characters may join from both sides. Out of 37, 17 characters of basic Urdu alphabet set have dots associated with them and quite often diacritics such as toy (ط) and hamza (ء) are used to recognize different characters from each other [6]. Moreover, within a ligature, horizontal overlapping of different characters is also possible in Urdu text. These different writing styles, cursive nature and

Segmentation is the step usually performed for the separation of different ligatures from each other. Segmentation approaches can be classified as implicit and explicit segmentation. In explicit segmentation, the words or ligature are divided into separate characters. However, in implicit segmentation, words or ligatures are segmented into smaller units while being recognized without any accurate splitting path. Implicit segmentation is also termed as straight or recognition based segmentation