CTRL –CapTuRedLight: a novel feature descriptor for online Assamese numeral recognition

Abstract

Online handwriting recognition (OHR) has gained major research interest not just due to the enormous technological advancement in recent years, but also the easy availability of the various electronic devices. This digital revolution is opening up a new dimension in every passing day to the regional and low resource languages with these languages get noticed by the researchers. In this paper, we have targeted a low resource language, Assamese, which is mainly spoken in the eastern region of India. We have proposed a novel and efficient feature vector for recognition of online handwritten Assamese numeral images. Our feature vector has been conceptualized based on the properties of light rays emerging out from a point source. Here we consider that there are multiple hypothetical light emerging sources in a sample numeral image. The amount of light fenced by the image is quantified and considered as a feature. The idea of using point light source to estimate the shape of online handwritten numerals is completely new and efficient. Impressive recognition accuracy is obtained on application of the feature vector on a standard online handwritten Assamese numeral database and it outnumbers some popular and standard feature descriptors, available in the literature. The source code of this work can be found in the following github link: https://github.com/ghoshsoulib/CTRL-Assamese-Digit-Recognition .