Recognition of Unconstrained Malayalam Handwritten Numeral

Main problem in handwritten recognition is the huge variability and distortion of patterns. To take care of writing variability of different individuals, a recognition scheme for isolated off-line unconstrained Malayalam handwritten numeral is proposed here. Main features used in the scheme are based on water-reservoir concept. A reservoir is a metaphor to illustrate the cavity region of the numeral where water can store if water is poured from a side of the numeral. The important reservoir based features used in the scheme are: (i) number of reservoirs (ii) positions of reservoirs with respect to bounding box of the touching pattern (iii) height and width of the reservoirs (iv) water flow direction, etc. Topological and structural features are also used for the recognition along with water reservoir concept based features. Close loop features (number of close loop, position of loops with respect to the bounding box of the component) are the main topological features used here. In the structural feature we consider the morphological pattern of the numeral. At present we obtained 96.34% overall recognition accuracy.