F-ratio Based Weighted Feature Extraction for Similar Shape Character Recognition

Recognition of handwritten similar shaped character is a difficult problem and in character recognition system most of the errors occur from similar shaped characters. In this paper we proposed a novel feature extraction technique to improve the recognition results of two similar shaped characters. The technique is based on F-ratio (Fisher Ratio), a statistical measure defined by the ratio to the between-class variance and within-class variance. F-ratio modifies the feature vector of two similar shape characters by weighting the feature elements. This weighting scheme enhances the feature elements that belongs to the distinguishable portions of the similar shaped characters and reduces the feature elements of the common portion of the characters, so that similar shaped characters can be identified easily. We considered pair of handwritten similar shape characters of different scripts like Arabic/Persian, Devnagari English, Bangla, Oriya, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu etc. and we noted that f-ratio based feature weighting shows better recognition results.