Bangla Character Recognition Using Optical Joint Transform Correlation

Abstract

Automatic Bangla character recognition has been a great challenge for research and development because of the huge number of characters, change of shape in a word and in conjunctive characters, and other similar reasons. An optical joint transform correlation-based technique is developed for Bangla character recognition which involves a simple architecture, but can operate at a very high speed because of optics, and offer a very high level of accuracy with negligible false alarms. The proposed correlation technique can successfully identify a target character in a given input scene by producing a single correlation peak per target at the target location. The discrimination between target and non-target correlation peaks is found to be very high even in noisy conditions. The recognition performance of the proposed technique is observed to be insensitive to the type and number of targets. Further improvement of the technique is made by incorporating a synthetic discriminant function, which is created from distorted images of the target character and hence can make the system efficiently recognize Bangla characters in different practical scenarios.