A System for Bangla Online Handwritten Text

Recognition of Bangla compound characters has rarely got attention from researchers. This paper deals with segmentation and recognition of online handwritten Bangla cursive text containing basic and compound characters and all types of modifiers. Here, at first, we segment cursive words into primitives. Next primitives are recognized. A primitive may represent a character/compound character or a part of a character/compound character having meaningful structural information or a part incurred while joining two characters. We manually analyzed all the input texts written by different groups of people to create a ground truth set of distinct classes of primitives for result verification and we obtained 251 valid primitive classes. For automatic segmentation of text into primitives, we discovered some rules analyzing different joining patterns of Bangla characters. Applying these rules and using combination of online and offline information the segmentation technique was proposed. We achieved correct primitive segmentation rate of 97.89% from the 4984 online words. Directional features were used in SVM for recognition and we achieved average primitive recognition rate of 97.45%.