ISSN 2347 - 7911

International Journal for Innovations in Engineering, Science and Management

Available online at: www.ijiesm.com
Volume 2, Issue 9,September 2014

Handwritten character recognition system with Devanagari script (SWARS)

Kanak Upmanyu
Dept. CSE, Integral University
Lucknow, UP
kanakgeart47@gmail.com

Mr.Shahid Hussain
Dept. CSE, Integral University
Lucknow, UP
siddiquisahil@gmail.com

Dr. Rizwan Beg

Dept. CSE, Integral University
Lucknow,

rizwanbeg@gmail.com
1.2 ONLINE SYSTEM

Abstract- To recognize handwritten Hindi characters

automatically is a very difficult because of characters
written in different ways like curves and cursively written
are differently in various ways. Therefore, these
characters are written in distinct sizes, dimension,
orientation, format and thickness. Offline written text
images from a piece of paper are scanned optically i.e.
OCR (optical characters recognition). Devanagari script
has 13 vowels and 33 consonants so, an offline
handwritten Hindi characters (on SWARS) recognition
system using neural network is presented in this paper,
Which can be used in popular and common applications
like government records, commercial forms, bank
cheques, post code recognition, bill processing systems,
signature verification and passport readers. In this paper,
by using Gradient descent approach, Devanagari script
characters are OCR from document images.

Keywords- Neural network Devanagari script, handwriting

recognition, OCR, Feature extraction.

1. INTRODUTION
Handwritten character recognition is a most important area of
image processing and pattern recognition. This area aim is to
translate human readable characters to machine readable
characters. Handwritten characters are non- uniform in
nature, a particular character can be written in distinct sizes
and styles by different peoples, also same writer may write
the same character in different styles at different times. These
Hindi handwritten characters may not be smooth curves and
perfect straight lines each and every time. Character
recognition system can be of two types:

1.1 OFFLINE SYSTEM

In the offline character recognition system, the image of
character is converted into bit pattern by optical digitized
devices such as camera and optical scanner. The recognizer is
also allowing written and printed text to be processed and
recognized. All characters are scanned image format in the
form of paper document. They are differently written.

In online character recognition system, real time character

recognition is used. Online systems have timing information
for recognition of characters. They define the position of the
pen like a function of time directly for the interface.
2. LITERATURE SURVEY
Firstly OCR research report on handwritten Devanagari Hindi
characters was published in 1977. In this paper, the
implementation is done on MATLAB which allows matrix
manipulation and plotting of functions or implementation of
algorithm. A two stage classification technique using ANN
was proposed by Arora et al [2] and obtained 90.74%
recognition rate. A back-propagation based neural network
recognition system has been published in 2012 by Sushma
Lehri by 93% recognition rate [1]. A fuzzy model based
recognition system was proposed with accuracy of 90.65%.
Hammandlu and Murthy proposed a fuzzy model based
recognition of Hindi numerals and characters and obtained
92.67% accuracy. Handwritten character recognition training
and classification of network using MATLAB by Ziga Zadnik.
Neural network based approach for recognition for
Devanagari characters is proposed by Shilpa Srivastava Khare
94% accuracy.
2.1 DEVANAGARI SCRIPT
Character recognition for Devanagari script is more complex
due to set of conjuncts. Sanskrit is a very ancient language
and no longer spoken. It is also used now a day, but Hindi is
an expressive language and also an attractive language. It has
33 consonants (VYANJANS) and 13 vowels (SWARS).
Hindi is one of the Indian official and IndoAryan languages.
Devanagari is written from left to right. It is the third most
language in India. An akshar is formed by a vowel only and
any combination of vowel consonants with vowel and
consonant is also combined with consonant. Character
recognition of Devanagari script is a very difficult task.

2.2 OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION

OCR stands for Optical character recognition. This
technology allows a machine to recognize characters using an
22

All Rights Reserved 2014 IJIESM

ISSN 2347 - 7911

International Journal for Innovations in Engineering, Science and Management

Available online at: www.ijiesm.com
Volume 2, Issue 9,September 2014
optical mechanism. Documents are in the form of papers
which are human readable but these documents are not
understood by the computer directly. The conversions of
documents from human readable to computer readable, OCR
systems are developed. It is an area of pattern recognitions
and processing of handwriting character to improve
communication between man and machine.

3. PROPOSED RECOGINITION SYSTEM

D.

(b) Edge detection of image using function.

Edge1=edge(uint8(bw2))
(c) Dilation of image using function.
Se=strel(square,3);
E2= imdilate(edge1,se);
Extraction and scaling the normalized
characters to 30x30 scale using
boundary value analysis
Imcrop()
Imresize(bw2,[30,30]);
4. RESULTS

The related works of this recognition system have four

stagesScanning: The handwritten data samples are takes from five
different people on paper. Through an optically digitizing
device such as optical scanner or camera, all the data samples
are scanned. This scanner is used to converts the scanned
data into a bitmap image.

Firstly, system training is done on Hindi (SWARS)

characters written in five different handwritings. These are
used as data set or samples. Character set is shown as in the
following figure:

Pre-processing: The various Operations are performed

during pre-processing. Thresholding is used to convert image
from gray scale to binary form.
Feature extraction: Transform the binary image into a onedimensional vector. Then train the system using backpropagation neural network and recognize it.
Recognition using back-propagation neural network: In
the proposed recognition system back-propagation neural
network is used for classification. A back-propagation neural
network is a multilayer feed-forward network trained with
gradient-descent based delta-learning rule or backpropagation learning rule. A MLP consists of an input layer,
an output layer and one or more hidden layer. Hidden layers
lie between input and output layer. The information flows in
forward direction only. Backpropagation learning rate
minimizes the total squared error of the output computed by
the network.

3. 1 PROPOSED ALGORITHM
The system performs character recognition by exploring the
feature of gradient descent for its ability to recognize
handwritten Hindi (SWARS) characters. The following steps
are used.
A.

B.
C.

A database of Hindi handwritten character is

created in different handwritings from 5 different
persons.
Pre-processing of training image.
(a) Binarization of image using function
Bw=im2bw()
Edge1=edge(uint8(bw2))

Figure 1. Sample data set

Chara
cter
no.

Output code

No. Of Recognitio
epochs n accuracy

1.

0001

950

95%

2.

0010

920

92.99%

3.

O100

800

94%

4.

0101

876

89%

5.

0110

954

93.68%

Average
recognition
accuracy

92%

Table 1: Results

23

All Rights Reserved 2014 IJIESM

ISSN 2347 - 7911

International Journal for Innovations in Engineering, Science and Management

Available online at: www.ijiesm.com
Volume 2, Issue 9,September 2014
Each character is entered as input vector. Total 65 characters
are taken as scanned image. Out of these 70% are used as
training purpose and 30% for testing. Results of recognition
are shown in Table 1.

5. Conclusion
In this paper, we are presented a system for handwritten
Hindi character recognition. Features are extracted using
conversion of gray to binary image. Recognition approaches
depend on the nature of the data to be recognized.
Experimental results show that back-propagation network
show recognition accuracy 92%.Here, two hidden layers in
back-propagation feed-forward neural network is used to
recognize any non-linear pattern with good accuracy. This is
one of the strength of the proposed method. In future, we can
include other features to increase the recognition rate further.

6. REFERENCES
[1]

[2]
[3]
[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]
[8]
[9]

[10]

Gunjan Singh and Sushma Lehri, Recognition of

Handwritten characters using back-propagation Neural
network, 2012.
Arora et al, Two stage classification technique.
Sunith bandaru, Handwritten character recognition
using neural networks.
Shruti Agrawal and Dr. Naveen hemarjani, Offline
handwritten character recognition with Devanagari
script,2013
Neha Sahu and Shipra gupta, Neural network based
approach
for
recognition
for
Devanagari
characters,2014.
Prof. Primoz Protocnik and Ziga Zadnik,
Handwritten character recognition: Training a Simple
NN for classification using MATLAB.
Dr. Manu Pratap Singh. Character Recognition using
MATLAB.
Govindan V. K. and Shivprasad A.P, Character
Recognition.
Verma B.K, Handwritten Hindi character recognition
using Multilayer Perceptron and Radial basis function
in neural networks.
Hammandlu and Murthy proposed a fuzzy model
based recognition of Hindi numerals and characters.

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