  Character recognition techniques for printed documents are widely used for
English language. However, the systems that are implemented to recognize Asian
languages struggle to increase the accuracy of recognition. Among other Asian
languages (such as Arabic, Tamil, Chinese), Sinhala characters are unique,
mainly because they are round in shape. This unique feature makes it a
challenge to extend the prevailing techniques to improve recognition of Sinhala
characters. Therefore, a little attention has been given to improve the
accuracy of Sinhala character recognition. A novel method, which makes use of
this unique feature, could be advantageous over other methods. This paper
describes the use of a fuzzy inference system to recognize Sinhala characters.
Feature extraction is mainly focused on distance and intersection measurements
in different directions from the center of the letter making use of the round
shape of characters. The results showed an overall accuracy of 90.7% for 140
instances of letters tested, much better than similar systems.
