Journal of Pattern Recognition Research

This paper addresses the problem of Bangla basic character recognition. Multi-font Bangla character recognition has not been attempted previously. Twenty popular Bangla fonts have been used for the purpose of character recognition. A novel feature extraction scheme based on the digital curvelet transform is proposed. The curvelet transform, although heavily utilized in various areas of image processing, has not been used as the feature extraction scheme for character recognition. The curvelet coefficients of an original image as well as its morphologically altered versions are used to train separate k–nearest neighbor classifiers. The output values of these classifiers are fused using a simple majority voting scheme to arrive at a final decision.