Holistic Urdu Handwritten Word Recognition Using Support Vector Machine

Since the Urdu language has more isolated letters than Arabic and Farsi, a research on Urdu handwritten word is desired. This is a novel approach to use the compound features and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) in offline Urdu word recognition. Due to the cursive style in Urdu, a classification using a holistic approach is adapted efficiently. Compound feature sets, which involves in structural and gradient features (directional features), are extracted on each Urdu word. Experiments have been conducted on the CENPARMI Urdu Words Database, and a high recognition accuracy of 97.00% has been achieved.