Off-line Cursive Handwritten Tamil Character Recognition

Abstract

Concerning to optical character recognition, handwriting has sustained to persist as a means of communication and recording information in day to day life even with the introduction of new technologies. Hidden Markov Models (HMM) have long been a popular choice for Western cursive handwriting recognition following their success in speech recognition. However, when it comes to Indic script recognition, the published work employing HMMs is limited, and generally focused on isolated character recognition. A system for offline recognition of cursive handwritten Tamil characters is presented. In this effort, offline cursive handwritten recognition system for Tamil based on HMM and uses a combination of Time domain and frequency domain feature is proposed. The tolerance of the system is evident as it can overwhelm the complexities arise out of font variations and proves to be flexible and robust. Higher degree of accuracy in results has been obtained with the implementation of this approach on a comprehensive database. These initial results are promising and warrant further research in this direction. The results are also encouraging to explore possibilities for adopting the approach to other Indic scripts as well.