Online system to assist improving Sinhala handwritings of kids

Abstract

Handwritten character recognition has been an interesting piece of work among the software developers and researchers. It is apparent that the people have attempted and succeeded in developing software for both Offline and Online Handwriting recognition in various applications. This dissertation describes a successful attempt that had been made to design and develop a system to recognize the Sinhala handwritings of Sri Lankan kids and to assist them on practicing and improving their handwriting, in an on-line system. To achieve the on-line nature of this work, the input handwritings to the system is to be made using a Stylus on a Graphic Tablet, Digitizer Tablet or a PDA which is sensitive to the stylus. An on-line Handwritten Character Recognition engine is built using the Lipi IDE with the Lipi Toolkit project where a number of algorithms related to Pattern Recognition are implemented, to recognize the Sinhala handwritings of the kid. The recognizer engine had been trained for a set of selected letters from the Sinhala alphabet up to an acceptable level of performance with handwritings of kids whereas the correctly and neatly written Sinhala handwritings of an adult have been used as the reference handwritings in order to compare the kid’s performance. Based on the input handwriting of the kid, it performs an evaluation of the kid’s handwriting and gives a real-time feedback with some tips on improving the handwritings along with a graphical representation of a comparison of the kid’s handwriting with a clearly, neatly, and correctly written letter of the particular input. Current image processing techniques had been used for the implementation of the components related to the above feedback. The end product: ‘Handwriting assistant for kids’ had been evaluated using a set of sample kids of the age below seven years who are in the stage of learning writing letters and forming words, together with their parents who are supposed to be the ‘guide’ of the kid in ‘playing with’ this system. The positive feedback of them revealed that the system has achieved its objectives up to an acceptable level.