Translation and scale invariant recognition of handwritten Tamil characters using a hierarchical neural network

A hierarchical neural network which can recognize handwritten Tamil characters independently of their position and size is described. A character is input as a pattern of (x,y) coordinates, subjected to very simple preprocessing. The network is trained by using the backpropagation learning algorithm. The performance of the hierarchical neural network is compared with and found superior to the performance of two other classifiers, namely, a single neural network approach and the method of moments in conjunction with a feedforward network