A Two Stage Classification Approach for Handwritten Devnagari Characters

The paper presents a two stage classification approach for handwritten Devanagari characters. The first stage is using structural properties like shirorekha, spine in character and second stage exploits some intersection features of characters which are fed to a feedforward neural network. Simple histogram based method does not work for finding shirorekha, vertical bar (spine) in handwritten Devnagari characters. So we designed a differential distance based technique to find a near straight line for shirorekha and spine. This approach has been tested for 50000 samples and we got 89.12% success.