Employing multi-agents to identify touching of adjacent digits in handwritten Hindi numerals

The paper addresses an important and vital problem within the general area of character recognition, namely the identification and recognition of touching in handwritten Hindi numerals. The basic idea is that while writing down numbers, it is possible to have adjacent digits touching each other. To handle this, we are developing a multi-agent system. So far, we have two agents, which are presented. The first agent works directly on the scanned image of the original handwritten number. It locates possible touching based on the thickness of handwriting. The other works on the thinned image. It segments the image into four categories of segments and tries to locate possible touching based on the rules that govern the connection of segments to form digits. After each of the two agents applies its own rules and investigates possible touching, and to increase touching recognition rate, the two agents negotiate and try to agree on the actual touching. The experiments carried out so far are promising and successful. The obtained results are very encouraging with a success factor of 92.70%