关键词: 手写文字, 哈萨克字符, 平行细化, 特征提取, 人工神经网络

Abstract: Character recognition system can contribute tremendously to the advancement of the automation process and can improve the interaction between man and machine in many applications，including office automation，check verification and a large variety of business and data entry applications.The main theme of this paper is the automatic recognition of hand-written kazakh characters using artificial neural networks in addition to conventional techniques.This approach has a number of advantages；it combines rule-based and classification tests；it is more efficient for large and complex sets such as kazakh characters；feature extraction is inexpensive and the execution time is independent of character font and size.Finally，a five layer artificial neural networks is used for the character classification.The system was tested by 10 different users，whose writing range from acceptable to poor in quality and the correct recognition rate was 91%.

Key words: hand-written, Kazakh characters, parallel thinning, feature extraction, neural networks