Language Model Based Online Handwritten Recognition System for Punjabi Language

Abstract

Handwriting is an important method of communication between human beings. This is also used as an interface between machine and human beings in a few applications. As such, the development of the handwriting recognition system is one of the important areas of research. Handwriting recognition systems can be developed for offline handwriting and also for online handwriting. In this work, an attempt has been made to develop online handwriting recognition system for Punjabi language. This is a popular language of North India and Gurmukhi script is used to write this language. Owing to the variations in handwriting style of the writers, the handwriting recognition is a challenging task. A good amount of research has been done on the online handwriting recognition for non-Indic scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. On the other hand, many researchers in India have also shown the interest in this direction in the recent past for Indic scripts, namely, Assamese, Bangla, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Telugu, Malayalam, and Tamil. The primary objective of this thesis is to build an efficient online handwriting recognition system for Gurmukhi script. The work done in this direction has been organized in seven chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the online handwriting recognition systems for various scripts. A brief discussion on the Gurmukhi script symbols, various phases in online handwriting recognition systems, major challenges in developing an online handwriting recognition system and the motivation behind the development of the proposed system is also included in first chapter. In Chapter 2, a comprehensive review of literature about the tools and technologies used for the recognition of online handwriting recognition systems has been carried out. The literature review covers the articles on Indic and non-Indic scripts. Chapter 3 has focused on data collection, pre-processing and feature extractionphases. Thesearethethreenecessaryphases, requiredbeforerecognition phase in online handwriting reconition systems.