Feature Selection for Recognition of Online Handwritten Bangla Characters

Feature selection through optimization techniques provides an interesting approach to minimize computational time with enhanced prediction capability, and has better cognizance of data in any pattern recognition application. This paper is an extended version of previously published work (Sen et al. in: 7th IAPR TC3 workshop on artificial neural networks in pattern recognition, Ulm, Germany, pp 246–256, 2016), where a quad-tree based image segmentation approach has been discussed to estimate some topological and shape based features (192-attributed) for the recognition of online handwritten Bangla characters. The previous work achieved a recognition accuracy of 98.5% on a database consisting of 10,000 handwritten Bangla characters. In this paper, parameters, used in the previous version during feature estimation, are tuned to improve the performance of the overall system. Thereafter, krill-herd a bio-inspired, meta-heuristic algorithm has been applied to find the optimal feature vector by reducing the dimension of the original feature vector. The reduced feature vector has been fed to Sequential Minimal Optimization classifier for the recognition of the same online handwritten Bangla character database used in previous work. It has been observed that result obtained with this optimal feature set is almost equivalent as the result produced by the entire feature vector.