Off-line cursive handwritten Tamil character recognition

Abstract

In spite of several advancements in technologies pertaining to Optical character recognition, handwriting continues to persist as means of documenting information for day-to-day life. The process of segmentation and recognition pose quiets a lot of challenges especially in recognizing cursive handwritten scripts of different languages. The concept proposed is a solution crafted to perform character recognition of hand-written scripts in Tamil, a language having official status in India, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. The approach utilizes discrete Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for recognizing off-line cursive handwritten Tamil characters. 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 and the precision of the results demonstrates its application on commercial usage. The methodology promises to present a simple and fast scaffold to construct a full OCR system extended with suitable pre-processing.