Handwritten Kannada Vowels and English Character Recognition System

In this paper, a zone based features are extracted from handwritten Kannada Vowels and English uppercase Character images for their recognition. A Total of 4,000 handwritten Kannada and English sample images are collected for classifications. The collected images are normalized into 32 x 32 dimensions. Then the normalized images are divided into 64 zones and their pixel densities are calculated, generating a total of 64 features. These 64 features are submitted to KNN and SVM classifiers with 2 fold cross validation for recognition of the said characters. The proposed algorithm works for individual Kannada vowels, English uppercase alphabets and mixture of both the characters. The recognition accuracy of 92.71% for KNN and 96.00% for SVM classifiers are achieved in case of handwritten Kannada vowels and 97.51% for KNN and 98.26% for SVM classifiers are obtained in case of handwritten English uppercase alphabets. Further, the recognition accuracy of 95.77% and 97.03% is obtained for mixed characters (i.e. Kannada Vowels and English uppercase alphabets). Hence, the proposed algorithm is efficient for the said characters recognition. The proposed algorithm is independent of thinning and slant of the characters and is the novelty of the proposed work

Incorporation of relational information in feature representation for online handwriting recognition of Arabic characters

Interest in online handwriting recognition is increasing due to market demand for both improved performance and for extended supporting scripts for digital devices. Robust handwriting recognition of complex patterns of arbitrary scale, orientation and location is elusive to date because reaching a target recognition rate is not trivial for most of the applications in this field. Cursive scripts such as Arabic and Persian with complex character shapes make the recognition task even more difficult. Challenges in the discrimination capability of handwriting recognition systems depend heavily on the effectiveness of the features used to represent the data, the types of classifiers deployed and inclusive databases used for learning and recognition which cover variations in writing styles that introduce natural deformations in character shapes. This thesis aims to improve the efficiency of online recognition systems for Persian and Arabic characters by presenting new formal feature representations, algorithms, and a comprehensive database for online Arabic characters. The thesis contains the development of the first public collection of online handwritten data for the Arabic complete-shape character set. New ideas for incorporating relational information in a feature representation for this type of data are presented. The proposed techniques are computationally efficient and provide compact, yet representative, feature vectors. For the first time, a hybrid classifier is used for recognition of online Arabic complete-shape characters based on the idea of decomposing the input data into variables representing factors of the complete-shape characters and the combined use of the Bayesian network inference and support vector machines. We advocate the usefulness and practicality of the features and recognition methods with respect to the recognition of conventional metrics, such as accuracy and timeliness, as well as unconventional metrics. In particular, we evaluate a feature representation for different character class instances by its level of separation in the feature space. Our evaluation results for the available databases and for our own database of the characters' main shapes confirm a higher efficiency than previously reported techniques with respect to all metrics analyzed. For the complete-shape characters, our techniques resulted in a unique recognition efficiency comparable with the state-of-the-art results for main shape characters