Multi-Language Handwritten Digits Recognition based on Novel Structural Features

Automated handwritten script recognition is an important task for several applications. In this article, a multi-language handwritten numeral recognition system is proposed using novel structural features. A total of 65 local structural features are extracted and several classifiers are used for testing numeral recognition. Random Forest was found to achieve the best results with an average recognition of 96.73%. The proposed method is tested on six different popular languages, including Arabic Western, Arabic Eastern, Persian, Urdu, Devanagari, and Bangla. In recent studies, single language digits or multiple languages with digits that resemble each other are targeted. In this study, the digits in the languages chosen do not resemble each other. Yet using the novel feature extraction method a high recognition accuracy rate is achieved. Experiments are performed on well-known available datasets of each language. A dataset for Urdu language is also developed in this study and introduced as PMU-UD. Results indicate that the proposed method gives high recognition accuracy as compared to other methods. Low error rates and low confusion rates were also observed using the novel method proposed in this study. (C) 2019 Society for Imaging Science and Technology.