A Novel Neural Net based Off-line English Character Recognition System

Abstract

Handwriting recognition has been one of the active and challenging research areas in the field of image processing and pattern recognition. In this paper, Off-line Handwritten English Character recognition is done using Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Artificial Neural Network (ANN) with its inherent learning ability offers promising solutions for handwritten character recognition. Each image character is comprised of 10×10 pixels. We have applied feature extraction technique for calculating the feature. Features extracted from characters are directions of pixels with respect to their neighboring pixels. These inputs are given to a back propagation neural network with hidden layer and output layer. We have used the Back propagation Neural Network for efficient recognition where the errors were corrected through back propagation and rectified neuron values were transmitted by feed-forward method in the neural network of multiple layers. In this learning process, training and testing of characters is done.
Keywords— Handwritten Character Recognition; Feature Extraction; Back propagation network; Training, classification