A system for machine-written and hand-written character distinction

In applications of character recognition where machine-printed and hand-written characters are involved, it is important to know if the character image, or the whole word, is machine- or hand-written. This is due to the accuracy difference between the algorithms and systems oriented to machine- or handwritten characters. Obviously, this type of knowledge leads to the increase of the overall system quality. In this work a classification system is presented which reads a raster image of a character and outputs two confidence values, one for "machine-written" and one for "hand-written" character classes, respectively. The proposed system features a preprocessing step, which transforms a general uncentered character image into a normalized form, then the feature extraction phase extracts relevant information from the image, and at the end, a standard classifier based on a feedforward neural network creates the final response. At the end, some results on a proprietary image database are reported.