A neuro-fuzzy inference engine for Farsi numeral characters recognition

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2010.02.088 * Corresponding author. Tel./fax: +98 (21)82883990 E-mail addresses: [email protected] (G mcmaster.ca (H.Q. Saremi), [email protected] (V. Character recognition of Farsi and Arabic texts as an open and demanding problem needs to encounter sophisticated specifications of the characters such as their shapes, continuity, dots and also, different fonts. Utilizing fuzzy set theory as a tolerant approach toward uncertainty and vagueness and artificial neural networks as a machine learning method in this paper, we propose a neuro-fuzzy inference engine to recognize the Farsi numeral characters. This engine takes holistic approach of character recognition through the comparison of the unknown character’s features with the features of the existing characters that itself is characterized through Mamdani inference engine on fuzzy rules which is largely enhanced with a multi layer perceptron neural network’s learning on features of the different fonts’ characters which leads to more comprehensive recognition of Farsi numeral characters in the proposed system. Having applied this novel engine on a dataset of unknown numeral characters consisted of 33 different Farsi fonts, it yielded more accurate results than the corresponding researches. The recognition rates of unknown numeral characters are greater than 97% except for Farsi character 4, so as the proposed schema could not score a better result than 95% for this numeral character which implies its recognition is still in need of more enhancement. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.