Neural network based handwritten character recognition system without feature extraction

Handwriting recognition has been one of the active and challenging research areas in the field of image processing and pattern recognition. It has numerous applications which include, reading aid for blind, bank cheques and conversion of any hand written document into structural text form. In this paper an attempt is made to recognize handwritten characters for English alphabets without feature extraction using multilayer Feed Forward neural network. Each character data set contains 26 alphabets. Fifty different character data sets are used for training the neural network. The trained network is used for classification and recognition. In the proposed system, each character is resized into 30×20 pixels, which is directly subjected to training. That is, each resized character has 600 pixels and these pixels are taken as features for training the neural network. The results show that the proposed system yields good recognition rates which are comparable to that of feature extraction based schemes for handwritten character recognition.