9. The computer-implemented automatic Arabic text image optical character recognition method according to claim 1 , further comprising the step of using separate HMM models for the different shapes of each Arabic character.
1. A computer-implemented automatic Arabic text image optical character recognition method, comprising the steps of: accepting as input an optical image of Arabic text and a predetermined selection of minimal Arabic text, the selection of minimal Arabic text representing substantially all Arabic letter shape occurrences likely to be input as text for character recognition; arranging all of the input Arabic text into a plurality of text image rows; segmenting each of the Arabic text input rows into a hierarchical stack of six segments vertically; performing feature extraction on the six segments of Arabic text for at least one of the input rows; inputting results from the feature extraction step into a Hidden Markov Model (HMM); storing results from the HMM to an HMM models database and to a language model database; performing a statistical syntactical analysis on the at least one input row of Arabic text; storing results of the statistical syntactical analysis to the language model database; selecting an optimized HMM from the HMM models database based on the statistical results stored in the language model database; inputting additional Arabic text; and performing text recognition on the additional Arabic text utilizing the optimized HMM.