A Novel Tamil Character Recognition Using Decision Tree Classifier

Tamil is a South Indian language spoken widely in Tamil Nadu, one of the states of India. It is one of the oldest languages in the world, and the Tamil script is used to write the Tamil language in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and parts of Malaysia, as well as to write minority languages such as Badaga. This paper presents an efficient method for recognizing Tamil characters based on extracted features like horizontal lines, vertical lines, loops, and curves. The extracted features are fed to Back Propagation based Neural Network (BPNN) classifier system, Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, and Decision Tree (DT) classifier. The DT classifier system has achieved very good recognition rate on the Tamil character database and shows improved performance as compared to BPNN classifier and SVM classifiers.