Feature Extraction Techniques for Recognition of Malayalam Handwritten Characters: Review

The Character recognition is one of the most important areas in the field of pattern recognition. Recently Indian Handwritten character recognition is getting much more attention and researchers are contributing a lot in this field. But Malayalam, a South Indian language has very less works in this area and needs further attention. Malayalam OCR is a complex task owing to the various character scripts available and more importantly the difference in ways in which the characters are written. The dimensions are never the same and may be never mapped on to a square grid unlike English characters. Selection of a feature extraction method is the most important factor in achieving high recognition performance in character recognition systems. Different feature extraction methods are designed for different representation of characters. As an important component of pattern recognition, feature extraction has been paid close attention by many scholars, and currently has become one of the research hot spots in the field of pattern recognition. This article gives a general discussion of feature extraction techniques used in handwritten character recognition of other Indian languages and some of them are implemented for Malayalam handwritten characters.