Template Matching Algorithm for Gujrati Character Recognition

At the dawn of the 3^rd millennium, Human Handwriting Recognition is emerging from its infancy and set to become a mature technique. We shall probably see in the near future a number of mixed systems able to read both online and off-line handwriting. In this study we propose a simple yet robust structural solution for performing character recognition in Gujrati, the official language of Gujarat. Pursued by the preprocessing techniques, we suggest a method called template matching where a character is identified by analyzing its shape and comparing its features that distinguish each character. The algorithm appears to be very robust against stroke order variations and large shape variations. The results seem encouraging.