Translation and Scale Invariant Recognition of Handwritten Tamil Characters Using a Hierarchical Neural Network

T.Paulpandian and V.Ganapathy

School of Computer Science and Engineering College of Engineering, Anna University Madras - 600 025,India

Abstmct- A hierarchical neural network which can recognize handwitten Tamil Characters independently of their position and size h described. A character is input as a pattern of (x,y) coordinates, subjected to very simple preprocessing. The network h trained by using the backpropagation learning algorithm. The performance of the hierarchical neural network is compared with and found superior t the performance of two other classifiers, o namely,a single neural network approach and the method of moments in conjunction with a feedfomard network.
I INTRODUCTION

I1 INPUT PATTERN, FEATURE EXTRACTION AND NETWORK STRUCTURE

Each group of Tamil characters is composed of substructures which are similar. The twelve Tamil characters used in our experiment are shown in Fig.1. The group of characters shown in Fig.l(a) have a similar '. Similarly, each group of characters is substructure of composed of common substructures. In order t utilise the o similar substructures, a modified crossing counting technique [6] is used. To make the features invariant to translation and scale distortions, the characters are centered and rescaled [7]. The origin is set at the center of a character:

The problem of recognizing handwritten characters invariant under translation and scale transformations is of enormous practical and theoretical interest. Neural networks have been constructed which recognize handwritten digits [l], complex handprinted Chinese characters [2], handwritten alphanumericcharacters [3], and handwritten Kanji characters [4]. This paper describes a hierarchical neural network that recognizes handwritten characters of Tamil ( which is one of the ancient langauages of India and more than 5000 years old) robustly, with little effect from changes in size, or shifts in position. In practical applications, translation and scale invariant pattern recognition is usually achieved by a two-stage process: conventional feature extraction methods are used to obtain appropriate invariant features from the patterns;this step is then followed by a trainable classifier which assigns a class label to the input pattern according to the The proposed method for character recognition has exploited the hierarchical structure of the Tamil characters for feature extraction. There exists a similar substructure for a group of Tamil characters. "Good" features which safsfy the following two requirements can be easily obtained for Tamil characters: (i) small intraclass invariance - slightly different shapes with similar general characteristics should have numerically close values, and (U) large interclass separation - features from different classes should be quite different numerically. The extracted features are presented to a hierarchical neural network (HNN) classifier to recognize each character. The performance of the HNN approach is compared to those of two other classifiers, namely, a single neural network (SNN) approach and the method of moments in conjunction with a neural network classifier [SI.
0-7803-1254-6/93$03.00 1993 IEEE Ca
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xo = (xmax + X m i n P

and YO = Omax + Y m i n V

and the character is rescaled according to the factors:

fx = (Xmax xminY2 fy = (Ymax YminY2

The new coordinates:

( X - W f x and ( Y-YoYfy

are such that both and vary between -1 and +l. The character is placed in a square box In Fig.,, the point 0 is the a n t r e of the character, and a, b, .., h are

Fig.1.

Examples o the four group of characters f

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Fig.2.

Feature extraction

arbitraly points on the edge of the box. The point (xl,yl) is the point where the line ao first meets black during the first phase of writing the character. The points (x2,y2)...(x8,y8) define the first set of features. The points (xg,yg) (~16, y16) which are obtained during the second phase of writing the character define the second set of features. The features so captured define topological features along the curve of the character.

....

Fig.3.

Architecture of hierarchical neural network

pLE-i
I1 d
1
I

The architecture of the HNN is inspired by the Two sets of a handwritten character. The characters in (a) are Fig.4. hierarchical structure of the Tamil characters. The first set used for training. The characters in (b) are used for testing. of eight features satisfy the requirements of the "good" features for classifying the four different groups of algorithm has been used to train each of the neural network characters. Similarly, the second set of eight features are classifiers. The selected parameters for the classifiers are as utilized to classiQ characters in each group. The HNN follows: initial weight assignment from -0.5 to 0.5, learning architecture is shown in Fig.3. Each module is a two-layer rate 0.7, momentum coefficient 0.7, and the stopping feed-forward network with one hidden layer and one output criterion for the algorithm a sum squared error value of layer. Each module is trained using backpropagation O.1.The classification accuracy is estimated by finding the learning algorithm [ I The module I in the first level of ratio of the number of the correctly classified test samples S. HNN is trained to classify the four groups using the first set to the total number of test samples. of features of all the hvelve characters. Each module in the " second level of HNN is trained to classify the three A. Experiments with H characters in each group using the second set of features of In the first set of experiments, the HNN as described in the corresponding characters. section 1 is used. The number of output nodes i four for 1 s Ill SIMULATION RESULTS the first level module and three for each of the second level modules. The number of nodes used in the input layer is The results of applying neural network classifier to 16 for each module. The number of hidden layer nodes is twelve Tamil characters are reported. Training has been varied from 4 to 32. Fig.S(a) and (b) show the results of the performed with a set of 3 examples of each character (for experiments with the HNN classiller when the number of a total of 36) produced by a variety of writers. Testing has hidden nodes i varied. s been carried out with another set of 36 examples produced by different set of writers. Three of the examples of the B.Experiments with SNN character ' % used for training and testing are shown in Fig. 4(a) and Fig.4(b) respectively. Three sets of We have also investigated the performance of the SNN experiments are carried out. The HNN is used in the first with one hidden layer. Al the sixteen features extracted l set of experiments. The other two classifiers utilized are the from the character as described in section I1 are applied as SNN and the method of moments. The classifiers are inputs to SNN. The number of output nodes is 12. S x y it simulated on a 80386 based PC/AT. Backpropagation samples are required for satisfactory training of the
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network. The corresponding Fig.S(a) and (b).

results are presented in

C. Experiments with Momen t-Invariant Features

To compare the HNN approach with other state-of-the art classifiers, we have examined the performance of a neural network classifier in conjunction with classical moment invariants[5]. Moment invariants are a set of nonlinear functions which are invariant to translation, scale and orientation and are defined on the geometrical moments of the image. Details of the method of moments can be found in the literature [5]. Khotanzad and Lu[5] utilized them for classification of English characters. We therefore adopt this scheme for comparison with HNN. The data base consists of 64x64 binary image of the 12 Tamil characters. A set of six nonliner functions $1 through $6 obtained from each of the three images per character are used as the features for training a mulitlayer neural network with one hidden layer. The number of output nodes is 12 and the hidden layer has 32 nodes. The speed of convergence of this classifier is very slow since some of the characters have similar features due to structural resemblance. The training is stopped after 3000 passes over the training data. The results are summarized in Table I for comparison.
TABLE I
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON AMONG HNN. SNN AND MOMENT INVARIANTS METHODS

800
HNN

$ 1
0

,
e
16

1
2 4
!

N ~ .at Hidden ~ d c r

F
U

(b)

0 .t; " .-

. t

2
0

U'

SOL

I 8 No. of

16 24 Hidden Nodes

32

FigS.

Comparative performance of hierarchical and single neural networks using varying number of hidden nodes: (a) classification accuracy and (b) number of passes over training set.

Method

Training Time (s) 420 1800 5400

Classification Accuracy(%) 94.4 72.2 72.2

No.of Hidden Nodes

HNN SNN Moment Invariants

4
20 32
REFERENCES D.J.Burr,"A neural network digit recognizer," IEEE-SMCJ6211625,1986. Yong Yao, "A neural network model of CAAM and its application to handprinted Chinese character recognition," Proceedings ofthe IEEE First Intern. Con. on Neural Networks,California,l987. K.Fukushima and N.Wake,"Handwritten alphanumeric character recognition by the neocognitron," IEEE Transon Neural Networks,vol.2, pp.355-365,1991. Y.Mori and K.Yokosava,"Neural networks that learn to discriminate similar Kanji characters," Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems l,(ed)D.S.Touretzky, Morgan Kaufmann

IV CONCLUSIONS

A hierarchical neural network for the recognition of handwritten Tamil characters independently of their position and size has been implemented. A feature extraction method based on the structural properties of the Tamil characters has been introduced which is found to be suitable for neural network classifier. The performance of the HNN classifier is compared with and found superior to the performence of two other classifiers, namely the SNN classifier and the method of moments followed by a conventional neural network classifier in terms of less training time and high classification accuracy. The HNN method leads to ecomomical networks with a relatively small number of hidden nodes because of modularity compared to other classifiers. Further research is under progress toward recognition of a large character set.
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Publishers,l989,pp.332-339.
AKhotanzad and J.Lu," Classification of invariant representations using a n e u r a l network," I E E E Trans.on ASSP, vol. 1 8 , ~ ~ . 1028-1038,1990, J.R.Ullman, Pattern Recognition Techniques, London Butterworths, 1973. I.Guyon,P.Albrecht,Y.Le Cun,J.Denker and W.Hubbard,"Design of a neural network character recognizer for a touch terminal," Pattern Recognition,vol.24,pp.lO5-119, 1991. D.E.Rumelhart and J.LMcClelland, Parallel Distributed Processing: Evplorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol.1, Foundations.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.

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