On the Significance of Stroke Size and Position for Online Handwritten Devanagari Word Recognition: An Empirical Study

Stroke size and position are considered as important information for online recognition of handwritten characters and words in oriental and Indie family of scripts especially because of their multi-stroke and two-dimensional nature. In an Indie script such as Devanagari, the vowel diacritics (matras) can occur at any position around the base consonant and there are even pairs of matras which have similar shapes and differ only in their position with respect to the base consonant. In this paper, we study the relevance of stroke size and position information for the recognition of online handwritten Devanagari words by comparing three different preprocessing schemes. Our experimental results indicate that the word recognition accuracy achieved using a preprocessing scheme that completely disregards the original sizes and positions of the strokes (and symbols) is comparable with the scheme that retains them, when the input is in discrete style, and contextual knowledge in the form of a lexicon is available.