Off-line Nepali handwritten character recognition using Multilayer Perceptron and Radial Basis Function neural networks

An off-line Nepali handwritten character recognition, based on the neural networks, is described in this paper. A good set of spatial features are extracted from character images. Accuracy and efficiency of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Radial Basis Function (RBF) classifiers are analyzed. Recognition systems are tested with three datasets for Nepali handwritten numerals, vowels and consonants. The strength of this research is the efficient feature extraction and the comprehensive recognition techniques, due to which, the recognition accuracy of 94.44% is obtained for numeral dataset, 86.04% is obtained for vowel dataset and 80.25% is obtained for consonant dataset. In all cases, RBF based recognition system outperforms MLP based recognition system but RBF based recognition system takes little more time while training.