Persian/arabic handwritten word recognition using M-band packet wavelet transform

The extraction of rotation and scale invariant features is an essential problem in document image analysis. This paper proposes an effective rotation and scale invariant holistic handwritten word recognition scheme. This approach utilizes M-band packet wavelet transform to extract feature vector of Farsi word image. The global and local features extracted are exploited in recognition of limited-size lexicon of handwritten words. The rotation and scale invariant feature of a word image involves applying a polar transform to eliminate rotation and scale effects, but this produces M-row shifted polar image, which is passed to a row shift invariant M-band wavelet packet transform to eliminate the row shift effects. The output wavelet coefficients are rotation and scale invariant. For each subband of these wavelet coefficients a set of local energy features are computed and we extract feature vectors from the subbands of wavelet coefficients. The proposed polar M-band wavelet features have been tested by employing Mahalanobis algorithm to classify a set of distinct natural handwriting Farsi words. We compared the proposed scheme with two well-known rotation invariant methods; Fourier-wavelet and Zernike moments. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the recognition rate about 12 percents. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.