Abstract: A recognition system for identifying hand-written Indian (Arabic) numerals for one to nine (9_1) has been developed. A graphical user interface was developed using advanced object oriented techniques that incorporates Matlab as a technical tool. The process involved extracting a feature vector to represent the handwritten sketch based on the "object" centroid and boundary points. A template vector was derived for each digit by taking the average feature vector of 30 different students. The test sketch is compared against all nine templates and a distance measure is performed to make the recognition. An overall hit ratio of 87.22% was achieved in the preliminary results. The ratio reached 100% for some of the digits. But there was misinterpretation between similar digits like (7) and (9). This study is meant to be a seed toward building a recognition system for Arabic language characters.