The Study of Handwriting Character Recognition (HCR) and Support Vector Machine (SVM)

The development of handwriting character recognition (HCR) is an interesting area in pattern recognition. HCR is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input such as digital cameras and other devices. HCR system consists of a number of stages which are preprocessing, feature extraction, classification and followed by the actual recognition. Handwritten can be classified into two components which are on-line and off-line recognition. Off-line recognition is selected as a focus of this paper. Off-line character recognition has been extensively studied over the last few decades and many such commercial systems are available today. Some of its application areas are automatic postal sorting, bank cheque processing, form processing and others. This paper introduces the principle stages of HCR for off-line system and support vector machine (SVM) in the classification process for recognizing a handwritten character.