Hybrid of HMM and Fuzzy Logic for Isolated Handwritten Character Recognition

Handwriting is a skill that is personal to individuals. The term “handwriting” is defined to mean as a surface consisting of artificial graphic marks conveying some message through the mark’s conventional relation to language (Plamondon & Srihari, 2000). Handwriting recognition is the task of producing the symbolic form, from the stored information of the handwriting data. Handwriting data is captured and stored in its digital format either by scanning the writing on paper or by writing with a special pen on an electronic surface such as a digitizer combined with a liquid crystal display. The two approaches are respectively distinguished as off-line and on-line handwriting. On-line systems for handwriting recognition are available in hand-held computers such as PDAs with acceptable performance (Plamondon & Srihari, 2000). Off-line systems are less accurate than on-line systems due to their less informative data capturing device, which is usually the scanner. However, they are now good enough that they have a significant economic impact in specialized domains such as interpreting handwritten postal addresses on envelopes and reading courtesy amounts on bank cheques (Plamondon & Srihari, 2000).