Effective Tamil Character Recognition Using Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms

Computational linguistics is the branch of linguistics in which the techniques of computer science are applied to the analysis and synthesis of language and speech. The main goals of computational linguistics include: Text-to- speech conversion, Speech-to-text conversion and Translating from one language to another. A part of Computational Linguistics is the Character recognition. Character recognition has been one of the active and challenging research areas in the field of image processing and pattern recognition. Character recognition methodology mainly focuses on recognizing the characters irrespective of the difficulties that arises due to the variations in writing style. The aim of this project is to perform character recognition for of one of the complex structures of south Indian language ‘Tamil’ using a supervised algorithm that increases the accuracy of recognition. The novelty of this system is that it recognizes the characters of the Predominant Tamil Language. The proposed approach is capable of recognizing text where the traditional character recognition systems fails, notably in the presence of blur, low contrast, low resolution, high image noise, and other distortions. This system uses Convolutional Neural Network Algorithm that are able to exact the local features more accurately as they restrict the receptive fields of the hidden layers to be local. Convolutional Neural Networks are a great kind of multi-layer neural networks that uses back-propagation algorithm. Convolutional Neural Networks are used to recognize visual patterns directly from pixel images with minimal preprocessing. This trained network is used for recognition and classification. The results show that the proposed system yields good recognition rates.