Tamil Handwritten City Name Database Development and Recognition for Postal Automation

Although there are some reports on offline Tamil isolated handwritten character recognition, to our knowledge there is only two reports on Tamil off-line handwritten word recognition. Also no city name dataset is available for Tamil script. In this paper we present a Tamil offline city name dataset, we developed, and propose a scheme for recognition. Because of the different writing style of various individuals, some of the characters in a Tamil city name may touch and accurate segmentation of such touching into individual characters is a difficult task. Avoiding proper segmentation here, we consider a city name string as a word and the recognition problem is treated as lexicon driven word recognition. In the proposed method, binarized city names are pre-segmented into primitives (individual character or its parts). Primitive components of each city name are then merged into possible characters to get the best city name using dynamic programming. For merging, total likelihood of characters is used as the objective function and character likelihood is computed based on Modified Quadratic Discriminant Function (MQDF), where direction features are applied. A dataset of 265 Tamil city names is developed. and the database will be available freely to the researchers. From the experiment of the proposed scheme 96.89% city name accuracy is obtained from this dataset.