In this paper, we propose a new scheme for Devanagari natural handwritten character recognition. It is primarily based on spatial similarity-based stroke clustering. A feature of a stroke consists of a string of pen-tip positions and directions at every pen-tip position along the trajectory. It uses the dynamic time warping algorithm to align handwritten strokes with stored stroke templates and determine their similarity. Experiments are carried out with the help of 25 native writers and a recognition rate of approximately 95% is achieved. Our recognizer is robust to a large range of writing style and handles variation in the number of strokes, their order, shapes and sizes and similarities among classes.
Dynamic time warping applied to Tamil character recognition