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Abstract: A recognition system for handwritten Bangla numerals and its application to automatic letter sorting machine for Bangladesh Post is presented. The system consists of preprocessing, feature extraction, recognition and integration. Based on the theories of principal component analysis (PCA), two novel approaches are proposed for recognizing handwritten Bangla numerals. One is the image reconstruction recognition approach, and the other is the direction feature extraction approach combined with PCA and SVM. By examining the handwritten Bangla numeral data captured from real Bangladesh letters, the experimental results show that our proposed approaches are effective. To meet performance requirements of automatic letter sorting machine, we integrate the results of the two proposed approaches with one conventional PCA approach. It has been found that the recognition result achieved by the integrated system is more reliable than that by one method alone. The average recognition rate, error rate and reliability achieved by the integrated system are 95.05%, 0.93% and 99.03%, respectively. Experiments demonstrate that the integrated system also meets speed requirement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]