Handwritten Tamil character recognition

Optical Character Recognition systems have been effectively developed for the recognizing the printed characters of many non-Indian languages like English, Chinese. At early stages few research works were carried out for recognizing the handwritten characters and now varies efforts are on the way for the development of efficient systems for recognizing the Indian languages, especially for Tamil, a south Indian language widely used in Tamilnadu, Pudhucherry, Singapore, Srilanka. In this paper, an OCR system is developed for the recognition of basic characters in handwritten Tamil language, which can handle different font sizes and font types. Hu's invariant moments and Zernike moments which have been used in pattern recognition are used in this system to extract the features of handwritten Tamil characters. Neural classifiers have been used for the classification of Tamil characters.