Automatically Structured Neural Networks For Handwritten Character And Word Recognition

Handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) is an important research field of pattern recognition, which has attracted extensive studies during the past decades. Recently convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods have achieved the state-of-the-art performance for handwritten Chinese character recognition. Nevertheless, handwritten Chinese character recognition is still limited to be effectively used in the actual environment due to the large-scale vocabulary and great diversity of handwriting style. In this paper, we constructed a handwritten Chinese character recognition service based on convolutional neural network, which tries to make effective use of handwritten based printed fonts and existing handwritten database. At the same time, the service can effectively collect more handwritten data to expand the training dataset, which makes it easy to adapt to the new handwriting styles. Meanwhile, We propose a multi-level recognition theory applied to online handwritten Chinese character recognition, which may improve the accuracy of handwritten Chinese character recognition and break the limitations of handwritten Chinese character recognition by identifying the structure of Chinese characters and possible stroke orders firstly. Furthermore, we try to apply the method of online character recognition to the offline character recognition based on the basic writing rules.

This paper presents a new linguistic decoding method for online handwritten Chinese character recognition. The method employs a hybrid language model which combinesN-gram and linguistic rules by rule quantification technique. The linguistic decoding algorithm consists of three stages: word lattice construction, the optimal sentence hypothesis search and self-adaptive learning mechanism. The technique has been applied to palmtop computer’s online handwritten Chinese character recognition. Samples containing millions of characters were used to test the linguistic decoder. In the open experiment, accuracy rate up to 92% is achieved, and the error rate is reduced by 68%.

In various application areas of pattern recognition, combining multiple classifiers is regarded as a method for achieving a substantial gain in performance of systems. The paper presents a method for handwritten Chinese character recognition to combine multiple classifiers based on statistics. Fusion strategies are discussed for providing a basis for combining classifiers. These combination strategies are experimentally tested on an online handwritten Chinese character recognition system. In our experiments, other combination approaches are also involved for comparison.

This paper presents a new approach to large-vocabulary online handwritten Chinese character recognition based on semi-tied covariance (STC) modeling. Detailed procedures are described for estimating the STC model parameters under both maximum likelihood (ML) and minimum classification error (MCE) criteria. Compared with the state-of-the-art modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) based classifiers, STC-based classifiers can achieve a better memory-accuracy trade-off, thus provide more flexibility in designing compact online handwritten Chinese character recognizers. Its usefulness has been confirmed and demonstrated by comparative experiments on popular Nakayosi and Kuchibue Japanese character databases.

This paper proposes an on-line handwritten Chinese character recognition system based on stroke-sequence feature extraction. The character to be recognized can be stroke-order and stroke-number free, tolerance for combined strokes, size flexible, but within the constraint of normal hand-writing. Firstly, the recognizer, using the finite state matching mechanism, is used to extract primitive strokes, represented as stroke string, from the input character. Secondly, the recognizer, using a modified dynamic programming matching method, is employed to perform recognition processes with the stroke-string features. Reference patterns have been generated 2500 Chinese characters with stroke-numbers ranging from 1 to 29. The recognition results are based upon the 1800 handwritten characters by 10 people. The obtained recognition rate is 94.5%, and the cumulative classification rate of choosing fourth most similar characters is up to 98.7%. In the last part, a secondary recognition mechanism is used to further tell apart the candidates involved. The final recognition rate may be promoted up to 99%.

Background: The growing use of smart hand-held devices in the daily lives of the people urges for the requirement of online handwritten text recognition. Online handwritten text recognition refers to the identification of the handwritten text at the very moment it is written on a digitizing tablet using some pen-like stylus. Several techniques are available for online handwritten text recognition in English, Arabic, Latin, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts. However, limited research is available for Indic scripts. Objective: This article presents a novel approach for online handwritten numeral and character (simple and compound) recognition of three popular Indic scripts - Devanagari, Bengali and Tamil. Methods: The proposed work employs the Zone wise Slopes of Dominant Points (ZSDP) method for feature extraction from the individual characters. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) classifiers are used for recognition process. Recognition efficiency is improved by combining the probabilistic outcomes of the SVM and HMM classifiers using Dempster-Shafer theory. The system is trained using separate as well as combined dataset of numerals, simple and compound characters. Results: The performance of the present system is evaluated using large self-generated datasets as well as public datasets. Results obtained from the present work demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms the existing works in this regard. Conclusion: This work will be helpful to carry out researches on online recognition of handwritten character in other Indic scripts as well as recognition of isolated words in various Indic scripts including the scripts used in the present work.

The present work deals with recognition of handwritten characters of Bangla, a major script of the Indian sub-continent. The main contributions presented here are (a) generation of a database of handwritten basic characters of Bangla and (b) development of a handwritten character recognition scheme suitable for scripts like Bangla consisting of many similar shaped characters for the benchmark results. The present database is a pioneering development in the context of recognition of off-line handwritten characters of this script. It has 37,858 handwritten samples and accommodates a large spectrum of handwriting style by Bangla speaking population. This database will be made available ( http://www.isical.ac.in/~ujjwal/download/Banglabasiccharacter.html ) free of cost to researchers for further studies. Also, we identified two major factors affecting high recognition accuracies for the present character samples, namely, (a) erratic nature of the presence of headline (shapes of Bangla characters usually contain a horizontal line in its upper part) and (b) existence of several pairs of similar shaped characters. The proposed recognition approach takes care of the above factors. It identifies any confusion in the first stage classification between a pair of similar shaped character classes and resolves the same in the second stage classification by extracting a feature vector based on a non-uniform grid.

The entirely distinct pattern recognition technologies have been proposed over recent years and thus the different research teams focus on the effects of popularity. Because of its use in many areas, such as pattern recognition and machine learning, handwritten character recognition has found great success. In online handwritten character recognition, the basic field is for use. The various character recognition techniques were suggested in the offline handwritten recognition process. Although the techniques for transforming textual content are established by some empirical studies and publications. This textual material has been translated from a paper file into a machine-readable form. The character recognition system could help produce a paperless document as a key in the coming days. The key aspect was the digitization of paper documents and the retrieval of existing paper records as well. In this job, we took out offline samples of some Rajasthani handwritten characters. The proposed average recognition rate for machine archives is 89.82 percent, using histogram oriented gradient features and support vector machine classifiers.

A multi-objective approach towards cost effective isolated handwritten Bangla character and digit recognition

This paper describes prototype learning for structured pattern representation with common subpatterns shared among multiple character prototypes for on-line recognition of handwritten Japanese characters. Prototype learning algorithms have not yet been shown to be useful for structured or hierarchical pattern representation. In this paper, we incorporate cost-free parallel translation to negate the location distributions of subpatterns when they are embedded in character patterns. Moreover, we introduce normalization into a prototype learning algorithm to extract true feature distributions in raw patterns to aggregate distributions of feature points to subpattern prototypes. We show that our proposed method significantly improves structured pattern representation for Japanese on-line character patterns.

This manuscript is focus on the utilization of object detection algorithm GLAC (Gradient Local Auto-Correlation) for the handwritten character recognition (HCR) problem. HOG and SIFT are already used in this (HCR) field except GLAC which produced good results than HOG and SIFT for object detection problem like human in images, pedestrian detection and image patch matching. This paper utilized GLAC algorithm to recognize the handwritten Devanagari characters. GLAC applied on two handwritten Devanagari databases, ISIDCHAR and V2DMDCHAR. The images of databases are also normalized with and without preserving aspect ratio. Using GLAC method and SVM classifier, the best results obtained on ISIDCHAR and V2DMDCHAR are 93.21%, 95.21 % respectively that justified the utilization of GLAC algorithm for character recognition problem.

Real-time arabic handwritten character recognition

The conversion of handwritten text into machine-readable format is termed as Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR). The differences in size, design, and alignment angle of the Telugu and Kannada alphabets have difficulty in recognizing handwritten documents in these languages across various real-world applications. Newly developed machine learning and deep learning models provide a significant improvements in the handwritten text recognition. These innovative methods offer promising enhancements in the accuracy and efficiency of character recognition within handwritten documents. However, effective recognition of digits is not an easy task due to people’s varying writing styles in the input sample. To overcome such limitations, we explore a novel approach specifically designed to boost the performance of HCR in South Indian languages such as Kannada and Telugu. Initially, handwritten images are gathered using traditional data sources. These collected images are then given into the recognition phase. Here, an Adaptive Dilated convolution-based Deep Network (ADC-DeepNet) is developed for character identification purposes. In ADC-DeepNet, the ShuffleNetV2 blends with the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) to produce accurate results. This fusion provides effective character recognition. Here, the Iterative Concept of Lyrebird Optimization (ICLO) is newly proposed to optimize the variables from ADC-DeepNet to improve the character recognition efficacy. The efficiency of the HCR system is evaluated among several recent techniques with some performance measures. Finally, the outcome showed that the accuracy of the proposed approach is 95.6, and other models like CNN, ResNet, Convolutional Autoencoder, and DeepNet gave the accuracy of 88.8, 91.5, 90.6, and 93.3, respectively. Thus, the findings of the experiment show that the developed ADC-DeepNet model can effectively identify the handwritten characters in south Indian languages.

Most Latin word and character recognition systems have numerous classification algorithms to automate the identification of handwritten characters. However, despite extensive research on various Latin-based languages, relatively limited attention has been given to the recognition of handwritten text in Nigerian indigenous languages. Handwritten character recognition is challenging due to the variations in shape and style. In addition to that, these characters naturally vary among individuals. This work presents an offline character recognition system for Igbo handwritten alphabets using convolutional neural networks. In this study, a dataset comprising 9,000 character images was created, with 250 distinct samples for each of the 36 letters in the Igbo alphabet. Of these, 200 samples per character (a total of 7,200 images) were pre-processed, binarized, and normalized for training two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. The remaining 50 samples per character (1,800 images) were reserved for testing. Model 1 and Model 2 achieved recognition accuracies of 83.5% and 85.0%, respectively. The proposed approach demonstrates potential for enhancing the automation and digitization of handwritten Igbo texts into machine-readable formats. Keywords: Optical Character Recognition, Igbo Handwritten Characters, Nigerian, Indigenous, Convolutional Neural Network Journal Reference Format: Woods, N.C. & Oyedeji, O.A. (2025): Offline Handwritten Character Recognition for Igbo Alphabets Using Convolutional Neural Networks. Journal of Behavioural Informatics, Digital Humanities and Development Rese Vol. 11 No. 2. Pp 115-126 https://www.isteams.net/behavioralinformaticsjournal dx.doi.org/10.22624/AIMS/BHI/V11N2P11

Due to increased usage of digital technologies in all sectors and in almost all day to day activities to store and pass information, Handwriting character recognition has become a popular subject of research. Handwriting remains relevant, but people still want to have Handwriting copies converted into electronic copies that can be communicated and stored electronically. Handwriting character recognition refers to the computer's ability to detect and interpret intelligible Handwriting input from Handwriting sources such as touch screens, photographs, paper documents, and other sources. Handwriting characters remain complex since different individuals have different handwriting styles. This paper aims to report the development of a Handwriting character recognition system that will be used to read students and lectures Handwriting notes. The development is based on an artificial neural network, which is a field of study in artificial intelligence. Different techniques and methods are used to develop a Handwriting character recognition system. However, few of them focus on neural networks. The use of neural networks for recognizing Handwriting characters is more efficient and robust compared with other computing techniques. The paper also outlines the methodology, design, and architecture of the Handwriting character recognition system and testing and results of the system development. The aim is to demonstrate the effectiveness of neural networks for Handwriting character recognition.