Handwritten Bangla word recognition using negative refraction based shape transformation

Abstract

Handwritten word recognition is considered as an active research area since long because of its various real life applications. The key obstacle of this research problem is the huge variation of the writing styles of different individuals. In addition to that the complex shapes of alphabet make the recognition process more difficult. A holistic word recognition approach is proposed here in order to classify 80-class handwritten city name images written in Bangla script. Based on the negative refraction property of the light, a novel shape-based feature vector of size 186 is generated from each of the word images. Effectiveness of the feature vector is tested on a database containing total 12000 handwritten word images having equal number of samples from each class. The proposed method achieves a reasonably good recognition accuracy of 87.50% which proves better while comparing with some of the recently published feature vectors used for similar job. The reported result is achieved by combining the classifiers namely Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), Simple Logistic and CV Parameter Selection embedded with SMO. To verify the robustness of the present method it is also applied on handwritten word images written in Roman and Devanagari scripts separately and it is found that our method obtains satisfactory result on the both the cases.