An artificial neural network approach to handwriting recognition

This paper explores the use of ANN (artificial neural networks) in handwriting recognition. The approach has been found to be very suitable for handwritten character recognition as it provides fast feature extraction and classification. Using the EBP (error backpropagation) algorithm, networks of relatively small sizes (ones requiring modest memory requirements) which can be trained in a reasonably short time were used. The recognition accuracy of the system has been found to be more than 97% with a response speed of about 1 character per second.