Online Handwritten Gurmukhi Character Recognition

Computers are greatly influencing the lives of human beings and their usage is increasing at a tremendous rate. The ease with which we can exchange information between user and computer is of immense importance today because input devices such as keyboard and mouse have limitations vis-à-vis input through natural handwriting. We can use the online handwriting recognition process for a quick and natural way of communication between computer and human beings. Handwriting recognition is in research for over four decades and has attracted many researchers across the world. Variations in handwriting are one prominent problem and achieving high degree of accuracy is a tedious task. The main goal of this thesis is to develop an online handwritten Gurmukhi character recognition system. Gurmukhi is the script of Punjabi language which is widely spoken across the globe. This thesis is divided into six chapters. A brief outline of each chapter is given in the following paragraphs. Chapter 1 includes three sections, namely, issues in online handwriting recognition system, literature review and overview of Gurmukhi script. Issues in online handwriting recognition system include: handwriting styles variations; constrained and unconstrained handwriting; personal, situational and material factors; writer dependent vs. writer independent recognition systems. In literature review, a detailed literature survey on each phase of established procedure of online handwriting recognition has been presented. The established procedure to recognize online handwriting includes data collection, preprocessing, feature extraction, segmentation, recognition and post-processing. We have also reviewed literature for different recognition methods. These recognition methods are statistical, syntactical and structural, neural network and elastic matching methods. In addition, we have also discussed some of the results reported in the literature of online handwriting recognition. This literature review covers different languages such as English, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu, Hindi, Bangali, Tamil and Telugu. In the overview of Gurmukhi script, we have included nature of handwriting in Gurmukhi script and different characters of Gurmukhi script. Chapter 2 contains the work carried out for three phases of online handwriting character recognition. These phases are data collection, preprocessing and feature extraction. These phases are discussed in three sections entitled data collection phase, preprocessing phase and computation of features phase. In data collection phase, input handwritten strokes are