Study and analysis of various preprocessing approaches to enhance Offline Handwritten Gujarati Numerals for feature extraction

Since last many years Optical character recognition has been an area attracting many researchers. Due to wide range of applications and advancement of digital technology offline and online handwritten character recognition for regional script is becoming fascinated area of research. In any character recognition system feature extraction phase requires input of image which is noise free, binary and having only region of interest. Main objective of Enhancement of image (EOI) phase is to process image in a way which gives more appropriate result than original acquired image for further steps in character recognition. This phase has high influence and hence plays a vital role in any character recognition system. Wide choices are available for digital image enhancement for enhancing visual quality of image. Choosing appropriate approach for image enhancement is a significant step. This paper discusses various image enhancement approach, analyzes them on the basis of result obtained by experimenting on sample handwritten image dataset at every step so as to provide suitable input for feature extraction for recognizing Offline Handwritten Gujarati Numerals.