Off-line Sindhi Handwritten Character Identification

Handwritten Identification is an ability of the computer to receive and translate the intelligible handwritten text into machine-editable text. It is classified into two types based on the way input is given namely: off-line and online. In Off-line handwritten recognition, the input is given in the form of the image while in online input is entered on a touch screen device. The research on off-line and online handwritten Sindhi character identification is on its very initial stage in comparison to other languages. Sindhi is one of the subcontinent's oldest languages with extensive literature and rich culture. Therefore, this paper aims to identify off-line Sindhi handwritten characters. In the proposed work, major steps involve in characters identification are training and testing of the system. Training is performed using a feed-forward neural network based on the efficient accelerative technique, the Back Propagation (BP) learning algorithm with momentum term and adaptive learning rate. The dataset of 304 Sindhi handwritten characters is collected from 16 different Sindhi writers, each with 19 characters. The novelty of proposed work is the comparison of the recognition rate for the single character, two characters and three characters at a time. Results showed that the recognition rate achieved for a single character is more than the recognition rate of multiple characters at a time.