Recognition of Online Handwritten Bangla Characters Using Supervised and Unsupervised Learning Approaches
This paper explores the domain of online handwritten Bangla character recognition by stroke-based approach. The component strokes of a character sample are recognized firstly and then characters are constructed from the recognized strokes. In the current experiment, strokes are recognized by both supervised and unsupervised approaches. To estimate the features, images of all the component strokes are superimposed. A mean structure has been generated from this superimposed image. Euclidian distances between pixel points of a stroke sample and mean stroke structure are considered as features. For unsupervised approach, K-means clustering algorithm has been used whereas six popular classifiers have been used for supervised approach. The proposed feature vector has been evaluated on 10,000-character database and achieved 90.69% and 97.22% stroke recognition accuracy in unsupervised (using K-means clustering) and supervised way (using MLP [multilayer perceptron] classifier). This paper also discusses about merit and demerits of unsupervised and supervised classification approaches.