Handwritten Bengali Numeral Recognition using HOG Based Feature Extraction Algorithm

Hand written character recognition is widely used in modern research. Recognize the characters from an image has always been active research area in the computer vision community. Apart from English, there are several regional languages available worldwide. In India there are 22 official languages, and Bengali is one of them. Bengali script has its own writing pattern. Like any other language number system, Bengali numeral system has ten different digits to indicate 0-9. It has its own alphabets and numerals. In this paper, Histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and color histogram for selection of features algorithm is proposed. HOG are used as the feature set to represent each digit sample at the feature space and Support Vector Machine (SVM) used to produce the output from input image. Proposed algorithm is efficient and gives an accuracy of 98.05 on CMATERDB3.1.1 dataset. This type of numeric image recognition can be use in the post offices to acknowledge the pin code written in Bengali.