Machine recognition of constrained hand printed devanagari

Abstract A method is presented for the machine recognition of constrained, hand printed Devanagari characters. A set of very simple primitives is used, and all the Devanagari characters are looked upon as a concatenation of these primitives. Most of the decisions are taken on the basis of the presence/absence or positional relationship of these primitives; and the decision process is a multistage process, where each stage of decision making narrows down the choice regarding the class membership of the input token.