BASIC HANDWRITTEN CHARACTER RECOGNITION FROM MULTI-LINGUAL IMAGE DATASET USING MULTI-RESOLUTION AND MULTI-DIRECTIONAL TRANSFORM

Abstract

This paper, proposes a novel approach for feature extraction based on the segmentation and morphological alteration of handwritten multi-lingual characters. We explored multi-resolution and multi-directional transforms such as wavelet, curvelet and ridgelet transform to extract classifying features of handwritten multi-lingual images. Evaluating the pros and cons of each multi-resolution algorithm has been discussed and resolved that Curvelet-based features extraction is most promising for multi-lingual character recognition. We have also applied some morphological operation such as thinning and thickening then feature level fusion is performed in order to create robust feature vector for classification. The classification is performed with K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) and support vector machine (SVM) classifier with their relative performance. We experiment with our in-house dataset, compiled in our lab by more than 50 personnel.