A Novel Tamil Character Recognition Using Decision Tree Classifier

Abstract

Tamil is a South Indian language spoken widely in Tamil Nadu, one of the states of India. It is one of the oldest languages in the world, and the Tamil script is used to write the Tamil language in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and parts of Malaysia, as well as to write minority languages such as Badaga. This paper presents an efficient method for recognizing Tamil characters based on extracted features like horizontal lines, vertical lines, loops, and curves. The extracted features are fed to Back Propagation based Neural Network (BPNN) classifier system, Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, and Decision Tree (DT) classifier. The DT classifier system has achieved very good recognition rate on the Tamil character database and shows improved performance as compared to BPNN classifier and SVM classifiers.

Keywords:

• Back propagation neural network
• Character recognition
• Decision tree classifier
• Entropy
• Information gain
• Support vector machine

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Selvakumar Raja

Selvakumar Raja received his B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from A.C.College of Engineering and Technology, Madurai Kamaraj University during 1989, M.E. degree in Applied Electronics from Government College of Technology, Bharathiar University during 1991 and Ph.D degree in Information and Communication Engineering from Anna University, Chennai during 2011. He has got 23 years of teaching and research experiences in reputed engineering colleges in and around Chennai in Tamil Nadu. Presently he is associated with Arunai College of Engineering, Tiruvannamalai as Professor and Dean in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering. His current research interests are in pattern recognition, image and signal processing. He is Life member of Indian Society of Technical Education (ISTE). He has published 3 research papers in leading International and National Journals and 6 research papers in leading International and National Conferences. E-mail: [email protected]

Mala John

Mala John did her M.Sc and M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and IIT Delhi respectively. She did her Ph.D in Anna University. She is a faculty member of the Department of Electronics Engineering, Madras Institute of Technology Campus of Anna University since 1992. Presently she is the Professor and Head of department of Electronics Engineering. Her interests include Communication, Signal Processing & Image Processing. E-mail: [email protected]