Feature Extraction Algorithm based Metaheuristic Optimization for Handwritten Character Recognition

Abstract

Interest in feature extraction for Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR) has been growing due to numerous algorithms aimed at improving classification accuracy. This study introduces a metaheuristic approach utilizing the Honey Badger Algorithm (HBA) for feature extraction in HCR. The Freeman Chain Code (FCC) is employed for data representation. One challenge with using FCC to represent characters is that extraction results vary depending on the starting points, affecting the chain code's route length. To address this issue, a metaheuristic approach using HBA is proposed to identify the shortest route length and minimize computational time for HCR. The performance metrics of the HB-FCC extraction algorithm are route length and computation time. Experiments on the algorithm use chain code representations from the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) dataset, containing 126 uppercase letter characters. According to the results, the proposed HB-FCC method achieves a route length of 1880.28 and requires only 1.07 seconds to process the entre set of character images.