Transformation Invariant Pashto Handwritten Text Classification and Prediction

Abstract

The use of handwritten recognition tools has increased yearly in various commercialized fields. Due to this, handwritten classification, recognition, and detection have become an exciting research subject for many scholars. Different techniques have been provided to improve character recognition accuracy while reducing time for languages like English, Arabic, Chinese and European languages. The local or regional languages need to consider for research to increase the scope of handwritten recognition tools to the global level. This paper presents a machine learning-based technique that provides an accurate, robust, and fast solution for handwritten Pashto text classification and recognition. Pashto belongs to cursive script division, which has numerous challenges to classify and recognize. The first challenge during this research is developing efficient and full-fledged datasets. The efficient recognition or prediction of Pashto handwritten text is impossible by using ordinary feature extraction due to natural transformations and handwriting variations. We propose some useful invariant features extracting techniques for handwritten Pashto text, i.e., radial, orthographic grid, perspective projection grid, retina, the slope of word trajectories, and cosine angles of tangent lines. During the dataset creation, salt and pepper noise was generated, which was removed using the statistical filter. Another challenge to face was the invalid disconnected handwritten stroke trajectory of words. We also proposed a technique to minimize the problem of disconnection of word trajectory. The proposed approach uses a linear support vector machine (SVM) and RBF-based SVM for classification and recognition.