A Two Stage Approach for Handwritten Malayalam Character Recognition

Handwritten character recognition is still a research challenge in OCR discipline, especially for Indian scripts. This paper deals with handwritten Malayalam, a major Indian script, where past work considered a small subset of characters only. In this paper we deal with complete set of basic characters, vowel and consonant signs and compound characters that may be present in the script. Here the recognition task is more difficult because of large numbers of classes and high interclass similarity. To tackle the problem, we proposed a two-stage approach. The first stage is a group classifier, where a group consists of similar characters and those that misclassify among themselves. In the second stage, a character assigned to a group in the first stage is classified to a particular character class. The proposed scheme is more accurate and efficient than a single stage scheme.