A Feature based on Encoding the Relative Position of a Point in the Character for Online Handwritten Character Recognition

Feature extraction is a very important step in the process of character recognition. The features extracted from the character should encode the local, global and the structural characteristics of the character shape. In this paper we propose a new feature for recognition of online handwritten characters called the star feature. The star feature encodes the local, global and structural characteristics of a character. The star feature describes every point of the character, in terms of its relative position with respect to the other points in the character. We have evaluated the performance of the star feature on IRONOFF data set and IWFHR-06 Tamil competition data set. The experimental results show that the star feature achieves high accuracy on both the data sets.