A Novel Geometrical Scale and Rotation Independent Feature Extraction Technique for Multi-lingual Character Recognition

Abstract

This paper presents a novel geometrical scale and rotation independent feature extraction (FE) technique for multilingual character recognition (CR). The performance of any CR techniques mainly depends on the robustness of the proposed FE methods. Currently, there are very few scale and rotation independent FE techniques present in the literature which successfully extract the robust features from characters with noise such as distortion and breaks in the characters. Many FE methods from the literature failed to distinguish the characters which look similar in their appearance. So, in this paper, we have proposed a novel scale and rotation independent geometrical shape FE technique which successfully recognized distorted, broken, and similarly looking characters. Aside from the proposed FE technique, we've used crossing count (CC) features. Finally, we have combined the proposed features with CC features to make as Feature Vector (FV) of the character to be recognized. The proposed CR technique is evaluated using publicly available media-lab license plate (LP), ISI_Bengali, and Chars74K benchmark data sets and achieved encouraging results. To further assess the performance of the proposed FE method, we've used a proprietary data set containing nearly 168000 multilingual characters from English, Devanagari, and Marathi scripts and achieved encouraging results. We have observed better classification rates for the proposed FE method using publicly available benchmark data sets as compared to few of the CR FE methods from the literature.