Recognition of handwritten Malayalam characters using vertical & horizontal line positional analyzer algorithm

This paper proposes an algorithm for the recognition of handwritten characters in Malayalam, a South Indian language. It introduces the salient features of Malayalam script and lists the approaches used for character recognition. Malayalam scripts are rich in patterns because of their complex curved form, larger number of basic elements and the presence of conjuncts. The combinations of such patterns make the recognition of characters much complex and these patterns should be exploited to arrive at the solution. Here an image of handwritten Malayalam characters is given as the input and an editable document of Malayalam characters in a predefined format is produced as output. In this paper, initially the overall structure of OCR system is presented. Then, the OCR process is presented in three modules: Pre-processing, Skeletonization and Recognition. In Pre-processing, we scan the input image and separate each character from it. In Skeletonization, we obtain one pixel thick skeleton of the character. In Recognition, we classify the characters based on their features. The features of the characters are extracted based on the analysis of position and count of the horizontal and vertical lines.