Turkish handwriting recognition system using multi-layer perceptron

Recently, handwriting recognition has found many application areas along with technological advances. Handwriting recognition systems can greatly simplify human life by reading tax returns, forwarding mail, reading bank checks, and so on. On the other hand, these systems can reduce the need for human interaction. Therefore, academic and commercial studies of handwriting characters have recently become an important research topic in pattern recognition. In this study, Turkish handwritten letter recognition system from A to Z was developed in C++ environment by using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). After the feature data were extracted, handwriting images were presented to the network, the training process of ANN was completed, and different handwriting images were classified with trained ANN. In this study, MLP (Multi-Layered Perceptron: MLP) type ANN and back-propagation learning algorithm were used. The ANN used has 35 inputs and 23 outputs. In the hidden layer, ANNs with different numbers of artificial neural cells (neurons) were evaluated and the most appropriate neural number ANN was selected. As a result, ANN with 24 neurons was selected in the hidden layer and handwriting images was classified with an accuracy rate of 94.90 %.