Abstract It is a well-known fact that building a character recognition system is one of the hottest areas of research as it is shown over the Internet and due to its wide range of prospects. The objective of this paper is to describe an OCR system for handwritten text documents in Kannada. The input to the system is a scanned image of a text and the output is a machine editable file compatible with most typesetting Kannada software. The system first extracts characters from the document image and a set of features are extracted from the character image using Zernike moments. The final recognition is achieved using support vector machine (SVM). The recognition is independent of the size of the handwritten text and the system is seen to deliver reasonable performance
