Recognition of handwritten Bengali characters: a novel multistage approach

A multistage scheme for the recognition of handwritten Bengali characters is introduced. An analysis of the Bengali character set has been carried out to isolate specific high-level features that can help in forming smaller sub-groups within the character set. This analysis demonstrates how detection of these various high-level features might help formulate successful multistage OCR design. A multiple expert decision combination hierarchy has been exploited to achieve higher performance from the proposed multi-stage framework. (C) 2002 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.