Recognition of handwritten Arabic (Indian) numerals using Freeman's chain codes and abductive network classifiers

Accurate automatic recognition of handwritten Arabic numerals has several important applications, e.g. in banking transactions, automation of postal services, and other data entry related applications. A number of modelling and machine learning techniques have been used for handwritten Arabic numerals recognition, including Neural Network, Support Vector Machine, and Hidden Markov Models. This paper proposes the use of abductive networks to the problem. We studied the performance of abductive network architecture on a dataset of 21120 samples of handwritten 0-9 digits produced by 44 writers. We developed a new feature set using histograms of contour points chain codes. Recognition rates as high as 99.03% were achieved, which surpass the performance reported in the literature for other recognition techniques on the same data set. Moreover, the technique achieves a significant reduction in the number of features required.