A Framework for On-Line Devanagari Handwritten Character Recognition

Abstract

The main challenge in on-line handwritten character recognition in Indian language is the large size of the character set, larger similarity between different characters in the script and the huge variation in writing style. In this paper we propose a framework for on-line handwitten script recognition taking cues from speech signal processing literature. The framework is based on identifying strokes, which in turn lead to recognition of handwritten on-line characters rather that the conventional character identification. Though the framework is described for Devanagari script, the framework is general and can be applied to any language.The proposed platform consists of pre-processing, feature extraction, recognition and post processing like the conventional character recognition but applied to strokes. The on-line Devanagari character recognition reduces to one of recognizing one of 69 primitives and recognition of a character is performed by recognizing a sequence of such primitives. We further show the impact of noise removal on on-line raw data which is usually noisy. The use of Fuzzy Directional Features to enhance the accuracy of stroke recognition is also described. The recognition results are compared with commonly used directional features in literature using several classifiers.