Character recognition using shape for curves

In this paper we propose a novel method for recognizing handwritten symbols. The method relies on two fundamental ideas. The first is to treat the character as a parameterized curve and to associate geometric invariants to it, and the second is to use a so called proximity measure for comparing invariants. The use of invariants makes the recognition insensitive to a preselected class of deformations. The class of transformations can for example be the affine or the positive similarity transformations. Furthermore, the entire curve is used in the recognition process and is treated as one object. Experiments indicate that the proposed recognition system performs well and is robust to the writing variations that exist between persons and for a single person at different instances, thus being promising for user independent character recognition