A Hybrid System for Handwritten Character Recognition with High Robustness

Abstract

In the past few decades, the offline recognition of handwritten Indic scripts has received much attention of researchers. Although an intensive research has been reported for various Indic languages, limited research work is carried out for handwritten Odia, Bangla character recognition owing to their complex shapes and the unavailability of the standard datasets. This paper proposes an automated model for recognizing both handwritten of Odia characters and numerals, along with Bangla numerals with maximum optimization efficiency. The proposed model primarily deals with feature optimization parameters which mainly comprises of three parts. Firstly, the fast discrete curvelet transform (FDCT) is used to derive multidirectional features from the character images. Secondly, PCA along with LDA is used to reduce the dimension of the feature vector. The features are finally subjected to both least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM), and random forest (RF) for classification. The effectiveness of proposed model is evaluated over three benchmark datasets such as Odia handwritten character, Bangla numeral and Odia handwritten numeral. The efficacy of proposed model achieves superiority as compared to state-of-art techniques. The discriminatory prospective of FDCT along with PCA and LDA features is establish more suitable than its counterparts.