A new benchmark on the recognition of handwritten Bangla and Farsi numeral characters

The recognition of Indian and Arabic handwriting is drawing increasing attention in recent years. To test the promise of existing handwritten numeral recognition methods and provide new benchmarks for future research, this paper presents some results of handwritten Bangla and Farsi numeral recognition on binary and gray-scale images. For recognition on gray-scale images, we propose a process with proper image pre-processing and feature extraction. In experiments on three databases, ISI Bangla numerals, CENPARMI Farsi numerals, and IFHCDB Farsi numerals, we have achieved very high accuracies using various recognition methods. The highest test accuracies on the three databases are 99.40%, 99.16%, and 99.73%, respectively. We justified the benefit of recognition on gray-scale images against binary images, compared some implementation choices of gradient direction feature extraction, some advanced normalization and classification methods.