Crow search freeman chain code (CS-FCC) extraction algorithm for handwritten character recognition.

In Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR), interest in feature extraction has been on the increase with the abundance of algorithms derived to increase the accuracy of classification. In this paper, a metaheuristic approach for feature extraction technique in HCR based on Crow Search Algorithm (CSA) was proposed. Freeman Chain Code (FCC) was used as data representation. The main problem in representing a character using FCC is that the results of the extractions depend on the starting points that affected the route length of chain code. To solve this problem, the metaheuristic approach via CSA was proposed to find the shortest route length and minimum computational time for HCR. The performance measurements of the proposed CS-FCC extraction algorithm are the route lengths and computation times. The experiments on the algorithms are performed based on the chain code representation derived from established previous works of Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) dataset which consists of 126 upper-case letter characters. Based on the result, the proposed CS-FCC obtained 1880.28 in term of route length and only needs 1.10 second to solve the whole character images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]