Freeman Code Based Online Handwritten Character Recognition for Malayalam using Backpropagation Neural Networks

Abstract

Handwritten character recognition is conversion of handwritten text to machine readable and editable form. Online character recognition deals with live conversion of characters. Malayalam is a language spoken by millions of people in the state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Pondicherry in India. It is written mostly in clockwise direction and consists of loops and curves. The method aims at training a simple neural network with three layers using backpropagation algorithm. Freeman codes are used to represent each character as feature vector. These feature vectors act as inputs to the network during the training and testing phases of the neural network. The output is the character expressed in the Unicode format.