%0 Journal Article %A Zaheer Ahmad and Jehanzeb Khan Orakzai and Inam Shamsher and Awais Adnan %D 2007 %J International Journal of Computer and Information Engineering %B World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology %I Open Science Index 8, 2007 %T Urdu Nastaleeq Optical Character Recognition %U https://publications.waset.org/pdf/1702 %V 8 %X This paper discusses the Urdu script characteristics, Urdu Nastaleeq and a simple but a novel and robust technique to recognize the printed Urdu script without a lexicon. Urdu being a family of Arabic script is cursive and complex script in its nature, the main complexity of Urdu compound/connected text is not its connections but the forms/shapes the characters change when it is placed at initial, middle or at the end of a word. The characters recognition technique presented here is using the inherited complexity of Urdu script to solve the problem. A word is scanned and analyzed for the level of its complexity, the point where the level of complexity changes is marked for a character, segmented and feeded to Neural Networks. A prototype of the system has been tested on Urdu text and currently achieves 93.4% accuracy on the average. %P 2380 - 2383