Development of indonesian handwritten text database for offline character recognition

Research and development of a character recognition systems in the past years has been matured with publicly available either free or commercial character recognition systems especially for isolated Latin characters in multiple languages. The character recognition problem itself can be considered as a mostly solved. Some problems that are still being worked on in this community are unconstrained handwritten text and culture specific scripts. Handwritten text is a special case when the script is used in more than one language; therefore the accuracy of the recognition depends on the knowledge of the language in which the text is written. Indonesia has a large cultural diversity especially languages because of its heterogeneous distribution of geographic areas. The implementation of handwritten character recognition for data acquisition in Indonesia still does not accommodate this background culture to improve accuracy since commercially available systems are developed with foreign language (English) although using the same alphabet. Therefore a local version of offline handwritten database (Indonesian) is required. The purpose of this paper is to report the collection of an Indonesian Handwritten text database. We collected various handwritten text samples which are isolated digits, mixed digits, isolated lowercase letters, isolated uppercase letters, lowercase words, uppercase words, and cursive words from college student source. We also present our method to select words which is used on the database.