2D Morphable Feature Space for Handwritten Character Recognition

Abstract

Handwriting style of an individual will be usually varying from other individuals. The degree of complexity involved in recognition of a handwritten character of south Indian languages is high due to the presence of compound characters. Furthermore the complexity of interpreting handwritten text aggravates due to irregular handwriting styles. Building of datasets for training the database in such environments is tremendous and requires a lot of manual data processing and other preliminary tasks. The major contribution focuses on creation of morphable feature space for addressing handwritten recognition problem. In this paper, techniques useful for simplifying dataset preparation procedures along with a hybrid recognition approach for improvising recognition accuracies of Telugu handwritten characters are proposed. The techniques include text document segmentation, automatic cropping and pincushion and distance transformation based recognition approach. A feature vector is generated from the normalized Gabor features are extracted from pincushion and distance transform models of a character image and classified using Ada boost classifier with a recognition accuracy of 89%.