Malayalam handwritten character recognition using convolutional neural network

Abstract

Optical Character Recognition is the process of converting an input text image into a machine encoded format. Different methods are used in OCR for different languages. The main steps of optical character recognition are pre-processing, segmentation and recognition. Recognizing handwritten text is harder than recognizing printed text. Convolutional Neural Network has shown remarkable improvement in recognizing characters of other languages. But CNNs have not been implemented for Malayalam handwritten characters yet. The proposed system uses Convolutional neural network to extract features. This is method different from the conventional method that requires handcrafted features that needs to be used for finding features in the text. We have tested the network against a newly constructed dataset of six Malayalam characters. This is method different from the conventional method that requires handcrafted features that needs to be used for finding features in the text.