An Overview of Character Recognition Systems

Character recognition is the processing by machine of text based input patterns to produce some meaningful output. Character recognition lies at the core of the discipline of pattern recognition where the aim is to represent a sequence of characters taken from alphabets. The advancements in pattern recognition has accelerated recently due to the many emerging applications which are not only challenging, but also computationally more demanding, such as Character Recognition, Document Classification, Computer Vision, Data mining, Shape recognition and Biometric Authentication etc. The area of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is becoming an integral part of document scanners and is used in many applications like postal processing, script recognition, banking security. Where OCR is a part of the character recognition. The research in this area has been ongoing for over half a century and the outcomes have been astounding with successful recognition rates for printed characters 99%, with significant improvements in performance for handwritten cursive character recognition where recognition rates have exceeded the 90%. Nowadays, many organizations are depending on OCR systems to eliminate the human interactions for better performance and efficiency. Because of this, it is necessary to know about the character recognition system. This paper helps to beginners, by presenting an overview of the character recognition system and its functional components.