Character recognition is intricate work because of the various writing styles of different individuals. Most of the published work on handwritten character recognition problems deals with statistical features, and a few works deal with structural features, in general, and Gurmukhi script, in particular. In the present work, we propose a methodology for offline handwritten Gurmukhi character recognition by using a modified division points (MDP) feature extraction technique. We also compare this

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... echnique with other recently used feature extraction techniques, namely zoning features, diagonal features, directional features, intersection and open end points features, and transition features. To select a representative set of features is the most significant task for a character recognition system. After feature extraction, the classification stage makes use of the features extracted in the previous stage to recognize the character. In this work, we used linearsupport vector machines (linear-SVM), k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), and multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifiers for recognition. For experimental analysis, we used 10,500 samples of the isolated, offline, handwritten, basic 35 akhars of Gurmukhi script. The proposed system achieved a maximum recognition accuracy of 84.57%, 85.85% and 89.20% with linear-SVM, MLP and k-NN classifiers, respectively, with a five-fold cross validation technique.