Recognition of handwritten Hindi numerals using structural descriptors

A method for the recognition of handwritten Hindi numerals is proposed based on structural descriptors of numeral shapes. The method consists of three major steps: 1) preprocessing, where a handwritten numeral is scanned, normalized, and then thinned; 2) a robust algorithm is developed to segment the scanned numeral image into stroke(s), based on feature points; and 3) identify cavity features. The output of this algorithm is a syntactic representation (that is one or more syntactic terms) of the scanned numeral. Finally, the syntactic representation is matched against a set of syntactic representation prototypes of handwritten numerals and the recognition result is reported. Early experimental results are encouraging and prove the tolerance of the proposed system to recognize a high variability of numeral shapes.