Ambiguity Reduction through Optimal Set of Region Selection Using GA and BFO for Handwritten Bangla Character Recognition

To recognize different patterns, identification of local regions where the pattern classes differ significantly is an inherent ability of the human cognitive system. This inherent ability of human beings may be imitated in any pattern recognition system by incorporating the ability of locating the regions that contain the maximum discriminating information among the pattern classes. In this chapter, the concept of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Bacterial Foraging Optimization (BFO) are discussed to identify those regions having maximum discriminating information. The discussion includes the evaluation of the methods on the sample images of handwritten Bangla digit and Basic character, which is a subset of Bangla character set. Different methods of sub-image or local region creation such as random creation or based on the Center of Gravity (CG) of the foreground pixels are also discussed here. Longest run features, extracted from the generated local regions, are used as local feature in the present chapter. Based on these extracted local features, together with global features, the algorithms are applied to search for the optimal set of local regions. The obtained results are higher than that results obtained without optimization on the same data set. Ambiguity Reduction through Optimal Set of Region Selection Using GA and BFO for Handwritten Bangla Character Recognition