Indian script character recognition: a survey

Intensive research has been done on optical character recognition (OCR) and a large number of articles have been published on this topic during the last few decades. Many commercial OCR systems are now available in the market. But most of these systems work for Roman, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic characters. There are no sufficient number of work on Indian language character recognition although there are 12 major scripts in India. In this paper, we present a review of the OCR work done on Indian language scripts. The review is organized into 5 sections. Sections I and 2 cover introduction and properties on Indian scripts. In Section 3, we discuss different methodologies in OCR development as well as research work done on Indian scripts recognition. In Section 4, we discuss the scope of future work and further steps needed for Indian script OCR development. In Section 5 we conclude the paper. (C) 2004 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.