A Hybrid Approach for Feature Extraction in Malayalam Handwritten Character Recognition

Optical Character Recognition can be defined as the process of isolating textual scripts from a scanned document. Many researches are going on in this field to make this character recognition process effective and error free. Malayalam handwritten character recognition precision is still inhibited around 90% due to the challenges in Malayalam character set. The presence of two different scripts old and new script, huge character set, presence of similar shaped characters makes Malayalam handwritten character recognition more difficult. Feature extraction for each language may vary depending on various characteristics of that language. The shape and structure of characters for each language have some common features. The handwritten character recognition method for Malayalam language proposed here uses a hybrid approach. Both language dependent and independent features are taken into consideration. The basic shape based features of Malayalam characters are also extracted for recognition.