Handwritten Character Recognition of South Indian Scripts: A Review

Handwritten character recognition is always a frontier area of research in the field of pattern recognition and image processing and there is a large demand for OCR on hand written documents. Even though, sufficient studies have performed in foreign scripts like Chinese, Japanese and Arabic characters, only a very few work can be traced for handwritten character recognition of Indian scripts especially for the South Indian scripts. This paper provides an overview of offline handwritten character recognition in South Indian Scripts, namely Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada and Telungu.Comment: Paper presented on the "National Conference on Indian Language Computing", Kochi, February 19-20, 2011. 6 pages, 5 figure

A fine-grained approach to scene text script identification

This paper focuses on the problem of script identification in unconstrained scenarios. Script identification is an important prerequisite to recognition, and an indispensable condition for automatic text understanding systems designed for multi-language environments. Although widely studied for document images and handwritten documents, it remains an almost unexplored territory for scene text images. We detail a novel method for script identification in natural images that combines convolutional features and the Naive-Bayes Nearest Neighbor classifier. The proposed framework efficiently exploits the discriminative power of small stroke-parts, in a fine-grained classification framework. In addition, we propose a new public benchmark dataset for the evaluation of joint text detection and script identification in natural scenes. Experiments done in this new dataset demonstrate that the proposed method yields state of the art results, while it generalizes well to different datasets and variable number of scripts. The evidence provided shows that multi-lingual scene text recognition in the wild is a viable proposition. Source code of the proposed method is made available online

Offline Handwritten Kannada Numerals Recognition

Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR) is one of the essential aspect in academic and production fields. The recognition system can be either online or offline. There is a large scope for character recognition on hand written papers. India is a multilingual and multi script country, where eighteen official scripts are accepted and have over hundred regional languages. Recognition of unconstrained hand written Indian scripts is difficult because of the presence of numerals, vowels, consonants, vowel modifiers and compound characters. In this paper, recognition of handwritten Kannada numeral characters is implemented and the different Wavelet features are used as feature extraction in this paper. The zonal densities of different region of an image have been extracted in the database. The database consists of 50 samples of each Kannada numeral character. For classification, the K-Nearest Neighbor method is used. Recognition accuracy of 88% has been achieved

Probabilistic Neural Network based Approach for Handwritten Character Recognition

In this paper, recognition system for totally unconstrained handwritten characters for south Indian language of Kannada is proposed. The proposed feature extraction technique is based on Fourier Transform and well known Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The system trains the appropriate frequency band images followed by PCA feature extraction scheme. For subsequent classification technique, Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) is used. The proposed system is tested on large database containing Kannada characters and also tested on standard COIL-20 object database and the results were found to be better compared to standard techniques

Handwritten Devanagari Text Recognition using Single Classifier Approach with VSPCA Scheme

In this research paper we used individual classifier approach for Handwritten Devanagari text recognition. We experimented different categorical classifiers namely   Random Forest Classifier (RFC), Support Vector Machine (SVM), K Nearest Neighbor Classifier (KNN), Logistic Regression Classifier (LogRegr), Decision Tree Classifier (DTree). Seven different feature sets are used namely Eccentricity, Euler Number, Horizontal Histogram, Vertical Histogram, HOG Features, LBP Features, and Statistical Features. The experimentation is carried out on 9434 different characters whose features are extracted from 220 handwritten image documents from PHDIndic_11 dataset. We deduced and implemented a unique scheme namely VSPCA scheme. VSPCA is Vectorization, Scaling, and Principal Component Analysis carried out on all feature sets before being given for model training. We obtained varied accuracies using all these five classifiers on all these six feature sets in which 99.52% highest accuracy is observed