Character recognition using Matlab's neural network toolbox

Recognition of Handwritten text has been one of the active and challenging areas of research in the field of image processing and pattern recognition. It has numerous applications which include, reading aid for blind, bank cheques and conversion of any hand written document into structural text form. In this paper we focus on recognition of English alphabet in a given scanned text document with the help of Neural Networks. Using Mat labNeural Network toolbox, we tried to recognize handwritten characters by projecting them on different sized grids. The first step is image acquisition which acquires the scanned image followed by noise filtering, smoothing and normalization of scanned image, rendering image suitable for segmentation where image is decomposed into sub images. Feature Extraction improves recognition rate and misclassification. We use character extraction and edge detection algorithm for training the neural network to classify and recognize the handwritten characters.