Lexicon Reduction Technique for Bangla Handwritten Word Recognition

In this paper we introduce a stroke based lexicon reduction technique in order to reduce the search space for recognition of handwritten words. The principle of this technique involves mainly two aspects of a word image to constitute a feature vector: one is word-length and the other is shape of the word. The length of the word image is represented by the number of specific vertical strokes present in the word image and, on the other hand, the shape of a word image is realized with the combination of both horizontal and vertical strokes. The experiment has been carried out with a database of 35,700 off-line handwritten Bangla word images. Though our proposed lexicon reduction technique is developed for recognition of Bangla handwritten words, its generalization property can easily be exploited for recognition of handwriting in other scripts also.