Isolated Kannada Character Recognition using Chain Code Features

Handwriting character recognition (HCR) is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret handwritten input. Handwritten Character Recognition is one of the active and challenging research areas in the field of Pattern Recognition. Pattern recognition is a process that taking in raw data and making an action based on the category of the pattern. HCR is one of the well-known applications of pattern recognition. Handwriting recognition especially for Indian languages is still in infant stage because not much work has been done it. This paper discuss about an idea to recognize Kannada vowels using chain code features. Kannada is a South Indian language. For any recognition system, an important part is feature extraction. A proper feature extraction method can increase the recognition ratio. In this paper, a chain code based feature extraction method is investigated for developing HCR system. Chain code is working based on 4-neighborhood or 8neighborhood methods. Chain code is a sequence of code directions of a character and connection to a starting point which is often used in image processing. In this paper, 8neighborhood method has been implemented which allows generation of eight different codes for each character. These codes have been used as features of the character image, which have been later on used for training and testing for K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifiers. The level of accuracy reached to 100 %.