A Framework for Devanagari Script-based Captcha

Human Interactive Proofs (HIPs) are automatic reverse Turing tests designed to distinguish between various groups of users. Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is a HIP system that distinguish between humans and malicious computer programs. Many CAPTCHAs have been proposed in the literature that text-graphical based, audio-based, puzzle-based and mathematical questions-based. The design and implementation of CAPTCHAs fall in the realm of Artificial Intelligence. We aim to utilize CAPTCHAs as a tool to improve the security of Internet based applications. In this paper we present a framework for a text-based CAPTCHA based on Devanagari script which can exploit the difference in the reading proficiency between humans and computer programs. Our selection of Devanagari script-based CAPTCHA is based on the fact that it is used by a large number of Indian languages including Hindi which is the third most spoken language. There is potential for an exponential rise in the applications that are likely to be developed in that script thereby making it easy to secure Indian language based applications.Comment: 10 pages, 8 Figures, CCSEA 2011 - First International Conference, Chennai, July 15-17, 201

Advances in Character Recognition

This book presents advances in character recognition, and it consists of 12 chapters that cover wide range of topics on different aspects of character recognition. Hopefully, this book will serve as a reference source for academic research, for professionals working in the character recognition field and for all interested in the subject

Design of an Offline Handwriting Recognition System Tested on the Bangla and Korean Scripts

This dissertation presents a flexible and robust offline handwriting recognition system which is tested on the Bangla and Korean scripts. Offline handwriting recognition is one of the most challenging and yet to be solved problems in machine learning. While a few popular scripts (like Latin) have received a lot of attention, many other widely used scripts (like Bangla) have seen very little progress. Features such as connectedness and vowels structured as diacritics make it a challenging script to recognize. A simple and robust design for offline recognition is presented which not only works reliably, but also can be used for almost any alphabetic writing system. The framework has been rigorously tested for Bangla and demonstrated how it can be transformed to apply to other scripts through experiments on the Korean script whose two-dimensional arrangement of characters makes it a challenge to recognize. The base of this design is a character spotting network which detects the location of different script elements (such as characters, diacritics) from an unsegmented word image. A transcript is formed from the detected classes based on their corresponding location information. This is the first reported lexicon-free offline recognition system for Bangla and achieves a Character Recognition Accuracy (CRA) of 94.8%. This is also one of the most flexible architectures ever presented. Recognition of Korean was achieved with a 91.2% CRA. Also, a powerful technique of autonomous tagging was developed which can drastically reduce the effort of preparing a dataset for any script. The combination of the character spotting method and the autonomous tagging brings the entire offline recognition problem very close to a singular solution. Additionally, a database named the Boise State Bangla Handwriting Dataset was developed. This is one of the richest offline datasets currently available for Bangla and this has been made publicly accessible to accelerate the research progress. Many other tools were developed and experiments were conducted to more rigorously validate this framework by evaluating the method against external datasets (CMATERdb 1.1.1, Indic Word Dataset and REID2019: Early Indian Printed Documents). Offline handwriting recognition is an extremely promising technology and the outcome of this research moves the field significantly ahead

Unicode-driven Deep Learning Handwritten Telugu-to-English Character Recognition and Translation System

Telugu language is considered as fourth most used language in India especially in the regions of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka etc. In international recognized countries also, Telugu is widely growing spoken language. This language comprises of different dependent and independent vowels, consonants and digits. In this aspect, the enhancement of Telugu Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR) has not been propagated. HCR is a neural network technique of converting a documented image to edited text one which can be used for many other applications. This reduces time and effort without starting over from the beginning every time. In this work, a Unicode based Handwritten Character Recognition(U-HCR) is developed for translating the handwritten Telugu characters into English language. With the use of Centre of Gravity (CG) in our model we can easily divide a compound character into individual character with the help of Unicode values. For training this model, we have used both online and offline Telugu character datasets. To extract the features in the scanned image we used convolutional neural network along with Machine Learning classifiers like Random Forest and Support Vector Machine. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), Root Mean Square Propagation (RMS-P) and Adaptative Moment Estimation (ADAM)optimizers are used in this work to enhance the performance of U-HCR and to reduce the loss function value. This loss value reduction can be possible with optimizers by using CNN. In both online and offline datasets, proposed model showed promising results by maintaining the accuracies with 90.28% for SGD, 96.97% for RMS-P and 93.57% for ADAM respectively

Online Devanagari Handwritten Character Recognition

This thesis proposes a neural network based framework to classify online Devanagari characters into one of 46 characters in the alphabet set. The uniqueness of this work is three-fold: (1) The feature extraction is just the Discrete Cosine Transform of the temporal sequence of the character points (utilizing the nature of online data input). We show that if it is used right, a simple feature set yielded by the DCT can be very reliable for accurate recognition of Devanagari handwriting, (2) The mode of character input is through a computer mouse - training the system with which will lead to jitter-robustness, and (3) We have built the online handwritten database of Devanagari characters from scratch, and there are some unique features in the way we have built up the database. Lastly, after comprehensive testing of the algorithm on 2760 characters, recognition rates of up to 97.2% are achieved