A modified approach to thinning of Devanagri characters

In this paper we present a modified algorithm for Devanagri character recognition. Devnagari characters are difficult to thin as compared to English characters due to presence of loops and conjuncts. The proposed algorithm modifies the thinning algorithm by taking special requirements of the Devnagari script into consideration. The character is first binarized and then crudely thinned. The noise is then removed. We have ensured that the basic characteristics of the image are maintained while keeping the algorithm as simple as possible. The performance of the algorithm is 94.56%.