Online Writer-Independent Character Recognition Using a Novel Relational Context Representation

Transforming handwriting into digital text and recognition of handwritten patterns opens a vast scope of application opportunities from searching for handwritten notes and document management to causing actions by writing symbols. Despite receiving a great attention, a massive number of applications, and a huge research effort, recognition of handwritten text has not still reached a desired efficiency and is an active area of research. One of the most important factors that makes handwriting recognition a challenging task is the huge variety of writing styles which can not be captured efficiently through available classification methods using current feature descriptors. Our approach to gain performance in online character recognition is to design more representative features for handwritten character representation in order to tackle the huge inter-class variability problem and increase recognition accuracy. The representation can also be used in recognition of other online planar patterns. The experimental results show that proposed representation with SVM classifier outperforms best reported recognition rates for Arabic characters in a writer-independent system.