Handwritten Character Recognition using Different Kernel based SVM Classifier and MLP Neural Network (A COMPARISON)

Abstract

Neural Networks and SVM are recently being used in various kind of pattern recognition. As humans, it is easy to recognize numbers, letters, voices, and objects, to name a few. However, making a machine solve these types of problems is a very difficult task .Character Recognition has been an active area of research in the field of image processing and pattern recognition and due to its diverse applicable environment, it continues to be a challenging research topic. It has numerous applications which include, reading aid for blind, bank cheques and conversion of any hand written document into structural text form. In this paper an attempt is made to recognized handwritten character using the multi layer feed forward back propagation neural network without feature extraction and SVM classifier. Character data is used for training the neural network and SVM. The trained network is used for classification and recognition. For the neural network, each character is resized into 70x50 pixels, which is directly subjected to training. That is, each resized character has 3500 pixels and these pixels are taken as features for training the neural network. For the SVM classifier recognition model is divided in two phases namely, training and testing phase. In the training phase 25 features are extracted from each character and these features are used to train the SVM. In the testing phase SVM classifier is used to recognize the characters. The results show that by applying the proposed system, we reached a high accuracy for the problem of handwritten character recognition.