A Novel Approach to Online Sinhala Handwriting Character Recognition on Handheld Devices

Abstract

Handwriting, being the main medium of written communication is now being overpowered by the digital technologies. There is a significant interest in addressing this issue and in facilitating handwriting recognition via electronic devices. Comprehensive studies can be found under this in both local and global contexts. In Sri Lanka, Sinhala language; being one of the official language, there are many approaches taken by the local science community to recognize offline and online Sinhala handwriting. However considering online Sinhala handwriting it lacks implementations for handheld devices. This study focuses on Online Sinhala Handwriting Recognition for handheld devices with the use of a Sinhala Spell Checker as a post processing technique. In this research, the writing angle, shape and size of the characters are used to recognize Sinhala handwriting. Therefore, the processing power and memory consumption is comparatively low thus making the solution efficient. Integration of a Sinhala spell Checker has increased the accuracy and handles any ambiguities in recognizing characters in a word. Sinhala Spell Checker is developed using n-gram probabilistic model and it is also capable of correcting errors occurred due to the phonetic similarity in letters. These techniques together provide a highly accurate solution for recognizing online Sinhala handwritten text, resulting an approximate accuracy of 89%.