Bangla handwritten city name recognition using gradient-based feature

Abstract

In recent times, holistic word recognition has achieved enormous attention from the researchers due to its segmentation-free approach. In the present work, a holistic word recognition method is presented for the recognition of handwritten city names in Bangla script. At first, each word image is hypothetically segmented into equal number of grids. Then gradient-based features, inspired by Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature descriptor, are extracted from each of the grids. For the selection of suitable classifier, five well-known classifiers are compared in terms of their recognition accuracies and finally the classifier Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) is chosen. The system has achieved 90.65% accuracy on 10,000 samples comprising of 20 most popular city names of West Bengal, a state of India.