Off-line Handwritten Character Recognition Using Features Extracted from Binarization Technique

The choice of pattern classifier and the technique used to extract the features are the main factors to judge the recognition accuracy and the capability of an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system. The main focus of this work is to extract features obtained by binarization technique for recognition of handwritten characters of English language. The recognition of handwritten character images have been done by using multi-layered feed forward artificial neural network as a classifier. Some preprocessing techniques such as thinning, foreground and background noise removal, cropping and size normalization etc. are also employed to preprocess the character images before their classification. Very promising results are achieved when binarization features and the multilayer feed forward neural network classifier is used to recognize the off-line cursive handwritten characters.