International Journal of Informatics and Communication Technology (IJ-ICT)
Vol 15, No 4: December 2026

Arabic calligraphy style recognition with edge enhancement and attention

Bilal Abdulrahman Tuama (University of Technology Malaysia University of Samarra)
Farhan Mohamed (University of Technology Malaysia)



Article Info

Publish Date
01 Dec 2026

Abstract

Arabic calligraphy style recognition is a challenging task because visually similar styles often share curved strokes, connected structures, and subtle ornamental variations. This study proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that combines learnable edge enhancement, squeeze-and excitation (SE) attention, and optional BiLSTM-based sequential modeling for Arabic calligraphy style classification. The edge module is designed to preserve fine-grained stroke boundaries, while the attention mechanism emphasizes informative channel responses and the BiLSTM models width wise contextual dependencies. Experiments were conducted on a public Arabic calligraphy style dataset using a stratified 70/15/15 train-validation test split. The best configuration achieved 98.22% accuracy and 98.20% F1-score on the test subset. These findings indicate that adaptive edge-aware feature learning can improve the discrimination of visually similar Arabic calligraphy styles. Nevertheless, broader validation on additional datasets and repeated runs is still needed to confirm generalizability.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

IJICT

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

International Journal of Informatics and Communication Technology (IJ-ICT) is a common platform for publishing quality research paper as well as other intellectual outputs. This Journal is published by Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science (IAES) whose aims is to promote the dissemination of ...