Recognition of online unconstrained handwritten Gurmukhi characters based on Finite State Automata

Abstract

This paper presents a language-based efficient post-processing algorithm for the recognition of online unconstrained handwritten Gurmukhi characters. A total of 93 stroke classes have been identified to recognize the Gurmukhi character set in this work. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier has been employed for stroke classification. The main objective of this paper is to improve the character level recognition accuracy using an efficient Finite State Automata (FSA)-based formation of Gurmukhi characters algorithm. A database of 21,945 online handwritten Gurmukhi words is primarily collected in this experiment. After analysing the collected database, we have observed that a character can be written using one or more strokes. Therefore, a total of 65,946 strokes have been annotated using the 93 identified stroke classes. Among these strokes, 15,069 stroke samples are considered for training the classifier. The proposed system achieved promising recognition accuracy of 97.3% for Gurmukhi characters, when tested with a new database of 8,200 characters, written by 20 different writers.