Neural Network Based Offline Tamil Handwritten Character Recognition System

Abstract

In this paper we propose an approach to recognize handwritten Tamil characters using a multilayer perceptron with one hidden layer. The feature extracted from the handwritten character is Fourier Descriptors. Also an analysis was carried out to determine the number of hidden layer nodes to achieve high performance of backpropagation network in the recognition of handwritten Tamil characters. The system was trained using several different forms of handwriting provided by both male and female participants of different age groups. Test results indicate that Fourier Descriptors combined with backpropagation network provide good recognition accuracy of 97% for handwritten Tamil characters.

A Survey on Tamil Handwritten Character Recognition using OCR Techniques

“…This will help to extract text information from low quality documents. Another approach named Two-Level Global Binarization Technique represents the output using global thresholding technique [24].…”

“…The approach scans until it finds the boundary of binary image. Then, the Fourier descriptor [24] is used to find the coefficient and obtain the total number of boundaries. This number of invariant descriptors is given as input to a neural network for further classification.…”

“…Another approach, Otsu's method may be used to perform histogram based thresholding [16] [14] to get binarized image automatically. Otsu's method has been extended for multi level thresholding, called Multi Ostu method [24]. Normally, most researchers use thresholding concepts to extract the foreground image from background image [18][21] [4].…”

“…Median Filtering [18], Wiener Filtering method [19] and morphological operations can be performed to remove noise [16]. Median filters are used to replace the intensity of the character image [24], Where as Gaussian filters can be used to smoothing the image [10].…”

Offline Handwriting Recognition Using Feedforward Neural Network

“…Challenges in handwritten signatures recognition lie in the variation and distortion of handwritten signatures, since different people may use different style of handwriting and direction to draw the same shape of any character (Hindi Characters: [2,11,9]), English Characters: [6,7,14]). …”