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
