On developing handwritten character image database for Malayalam language script

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to build a handwritten character image database for Malayalam language script. Standard handwritten document image databases are an essential requirement for the development and objective evaluation of different handwritten text recognition systems for any language script. Considerable research efforts for handwritten Malayalam character recognition are present in literature. Still, no public domain handwritten image database is available for the Malayalam language. The present work focuses on building an open source handwritten character image database for Malayalam language script. The unique orthographic representation of the Malayalam characters forms the different character classes, and the current version of the database contains 85 character classes frequently used in writing Malayalam text. Handwritten data samples collected from 77 native Malayalam writers. For extracting the character images from the handwritten data sheets, active contour model-based image segmentation algorithm utilized. Recognition experiments conducted on the created character image database by employing different feature extraction techniques. Among the considered feature descriptors, scattering convolutional network-based feature descriptors attain the highest recognition accuracy of 91.05%. Keywords: Malayalam language, Handwritten character recognition, Handwritten character image database, Active contour minimization, Optical character recognition, Feature extraction