Abstract:
Handwriting recognition has become one of the forthcoming research topics due to
the exponential growth of the usage of the devices such as take note, PDA, iPad, and
smart phonesetc. Writing on those devices is quite similar to the writing with pen and
paper. But, these devices can take input faster than a keyword and also minimize the
chances of errors due to mistyping. In this study, a model for Amharic handwriting
character recognition is proposed for the 238 basic Amharic characterswritten by
different background and age group. It is collected by using an Acer desktop with
interactive board, LG tablet and Digimemo devices in UNIPEN format.It consists of
36220 character samples with 181 writers. Data need to be pre-processed, as the data
collected in real environment, it can be noisy and inconsistent. It consists
normalization, interpolation, smoothing and resampling techniques used and
informative and non-redundant features builds by hybrid techniques like:-curliness
linearity, slope , curvature, zones and aspect andonce this stage is provided with the
data set from the feature extraction stage, those data can be fed to the decision making
model to perform the recognition and classification. Our paper presents a model for
Amharic handwriting character recognition by deep fully connected network (Deep-FCN).Extensive experimental results show that our model not only generates
recognition of characters but also facilitates the accuracy improvement of handwritten
character recognition rateon test dataset; the technique has been provided 96.56%
recognition accuracy. The result thus obtained in this study is promising to apply fully
connected network for character recognition. It is a further research direction.
However, time constraint, only basic characters and character level recognition
considered. But their solutions have not been tested in real environment.
Keywords: Handwritten character recognition,Amharic handwriting character
recognition, Stroke,deep fully connected network, OCR, CNN, SVM.