Performance Comparison of SVM and ANN for Handwritten Devnagari Character Recognition

Abstract: Classification methods based on learning from examples have been widely applied to character recognition from the 1990s and have brought forth significant improvements of recognition accuracies. This class of methods includes statistical methods, artificial neural networks, support vector machines (SVM), multiple classifier combination, etc. In this paper, we discuss the characteristics of the some classification methods that have been successfully applied to handwritten Devnagari character recognition and results of SVM and ANNs classification method, applied on Handwritten Devnagari characters. After preprocessing the character image, we extracted shadow features, chain code histogram features, view based features and longest run features. These features are then fed to Neural classifier and in support vector machine for classification. In neural classifier, we explored three ways of combining decisions of four MLP's designed for four different features.