A multi-objective approach towards cost effective isolated handwritten Bangla character and digit recognition

Identifying the most informative local regions of a handwritten character image is necessary for a robust handwritten character recognition system. But identifying them from a character image is a difficult task. If this task were to be performed incurring minimum possible cost, it becomes more challenging due to having two independent, apparently contradicting objectives which need to be optimized simultaneously, i.e. maximizing the recognition accuracy and minimizing the associated recognition cost. To address the problem a multi-objective approach is required. In the present task, two popular multi objective optimization Algorithm (1) a Non-Dominated Sorting Harmony-Search Algorithm (NSHA) and (2) a Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-Il, Deb et al., 2002 [18]) are employed for region sampling separately. The method objectively selects the most informative set of local regions using the framework of Axiomatic Fuzzy Set (AFS) theory, from the sets of pareto-optimal solutions provided by the multi-objective region sampling algorithms. The system has been evaluated on two isolated handwritten Bangla datasets, (1) a dataset of randomly mixed handwritten Bangla Basic and Compound characters and (2) a dataset of handwritten Bangla numerals separately, with SVM based classifier, using a feature set containing convex-hull based features and CG based quad-tree partitioned longest-run based local features extracted from the selected local regions. The results have shown a significant increase in recognition accuracy and decrease in recognition cost for all the datasets. Thus the present system introduces a cost effective approach towards isolated handwritten character recognition systems. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.