Recognition of Handwritten Hindi Text Using Middle Region of the Words

Abstract

Offline handwritten Hindi text recognition is a very tedious task. In this paper, a novel method using middle region of the words for recognition of handwritten Hindi text is proposed. A segmentation based approach is used for recognition. Although many efforts have been made to recognize isolated characters and words, a little work has been done to recognize the offline handwritten Hindi text by segmenting the sentences into lines and lines into words. The uniqueness of this approach lies in the fact that many of the commonly used words can be recognized by matching all the characters in the middle zone even by ignoring the upper modifiers, lower modifiers and half characters. Another advantage is that it is not word specific i.e. any number of words can be added to the list to be recognized. Topological features are used for recognition of characters and efforts are made to correctly extract the features. Results obtained with the proposed technique are very challenging.