Spatiostructural features for recognition of online handwritten characters in Devanagari and Tamil scripts

The spatiostructural features proposed for recognition of online handwritten characters refer to offline-like features that convey information about both the positional and structural (shape) characteristics of the handwriting unit. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of representing an online handwritten stroke using spatiostructural features, as indicated by its effect on the stroke classification accuracy by a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based classifier. The study has been done on two major Indian writing systems, Devanagari and Tamil. The importance of localization information of the structural features and handling of translational variance is studied using appropriate approaches to zoning the handwritten character. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.