Preprocessing Algorithms for the Recognition of Tamil Handwritten Characters

Abstract

Handwriting has continued to persist as a means of communication and recording information in day-to-day life even with the introduction of new technologies. Handwriting is a skill that is personal to individuals. Recognition of characters is an important area in machine learning. Widespread acceptance of digital computers seemingly challenges the future of handwriting. However, in numerous situations, a pen together with paper or a small notepad is much more convenient than a keyboard. Handwriting data is converted to digital form either by scanning the writing on paper or by writing with a special pen on an electronic surface such as a digitizer combined with a liquid crystal display. The two approaches are distinguished as offline and online handwriting respectively. It is necessary to perform several document analysis operations prior to recognizing text in scanned documents. This paper presents detailed analysis of various preprocessing operations performed prior to recognition of Tamil handwritten characters and the results are shown.