Stroke Analysis of Devnagari Handwritten Characters

Devnagari script is the major script of India and is widely used for various languages. In this work we propose a stroke based technique for analyzing handwritten Devnagari characters. After preprocessing the character is segmented in various strokes using our thinning and segmentation algorithm. We propose average compressed direction codes for segmented strokes to classify the strokes as left curve, right curve, horizontal stroke, vertical stroke and slanted lines etc. The knowledge of script grammar is applied to identify the character using shapes of strokes, mean, relative strength, straightness, circularity and area. The system tolerates slant of about 10o left and right and a skew of 5o up and down. The system gives high discrimination between similar characters and gives a recognition accuracy of 85%.