Neural Network Based Offline Tamil Handwritten Character Recognition System

In this paper we propose an approach to recognize handwritten Tamil characters using a multilayer perceptron with one hidden layer. The feature extracted from the handwritten character is Fourier descriptors. Also an analysis was carried out to determine the number of hidden layer nodes to achieve high performance of backpropagation network in the recognition of handwritten Tamil characters. The system was trained using several different forms of handwriting provided by both male and female participants of different age groups. Test results indicate that Fourier descriptors combined with backpropagation network provide good recognition accuracy of 97% for handwritten Tamil characters.