SVM-PCA Based Handwritten Devanagari Digit Character Recognition

Objective: The blended fusion of Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) have been widely used in recognizing handwritten digit characters of Devanagari script. The feature information from the character is extracted using its skeleton structure which optimally reduce data dimensionality using PCA. There is ample information available on handwritten charac-ter recognition on Indian and Non-Indian scripts but very few article emphasized on recognition of Devanagari scripts. Therefore, this paper presents an efficient handwritten Devanagari character recognition system based on block based feature extraction and PCA-SVM classifier. Methods: We have collected samples of handwritten Devanagari characters from different handwritten experts for classification. Results: For experimental work, total of 100 images having Devanagari digit characters been used for the purpose of training and testing. The proposed system achieves a maximum recognition accuracy of 96.6 % and 96.5% for 5 & 10 fold validations with 70% training and 30% testing data using block based feature and SVM classifier having different kernels. Conclusion: The obtained results achieve maximum accuracy using SVM classifier for digit character recognition. In future deep learning networks will be considered for accuracy enhancement and precision.