A Novel OCR System for Calculating Handwritten Persian Arithmetic Expressions

In this paper, we propose a novel OCR system which can recognize and calculate handwritten Persian arithmetic expressions without using a keyboard or a memory to store the intermediate results. Our system is composed of two major phases: character recognition and calculation. The recognition phase is based on a new approach for feature extraction followed by a Fuzzy Support Vector Machines (FSVMs) as the classifier. In calculation phase a simple algorithm is used for calculating the recognized arithmetic expressions. The performance of the system was evaluated on a database consisting of 3400 digits and symbols written by 20 different people. 92 percent accuracy in recognition proves the good performance of the proposed system.