A Hybrid Approach for Recognition of Hand Written Devnagri Compound Characters

Abstract

Being an effective tool in the world of communication, numerous techniques have been developed for documenting the handwritten text. Few of the exceptional techniques describe the environment of handwritten scripts and further convert it into electronic data by implementing various algorithms. Devnagri is one of the widely used scripts for most popular and commonly used languages like Marathi and Hindi. Recent development in the field of handwritten character recognition based on different methodologies like neural network, fuzzy logic, and deep neural networks has shown remarkable improvement in character recognition accuracy from 75% to 96%. We propose a fuzzy-Neural hybrid approach for recognition of hand written Devnagri compound character that uses a rotation invariant rule-based thinning algorithm as one of the major pre-processing activity. Thinning the characters to their central line, preserving the shape of the character are the distinctive features of thinning algorithm. Concurrent application of different rules to each pixel of the character image results into symmetrical thinning as well as improves the overall speed of the system. The system is trained using Neural Network where the weights are optimized using fuzzy rules improving the accuracy of the system.Results obtained for the fuzzy-neural based system with thinning helps in preserving the topology of the characters written in Devnagri and prove that accuracy of the system has stabilized in the band of 92-97% which was fluctuating in the band of 89-94% for the previously implemented systems. The system also shows a substantial improvement in accuracy for recognition of compound characters in comparison with our previously implemented system.