Handwritten Script Identification from Text Lines
This work addresses the need for automatic script identification in multilingual countries like India, facilitating applications such as document transcription and OCR selection, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying handwritten scripts from text lines in multilingual documents, achieving an average identification rate of 95.14% using features like Chain Code Histogram and Discrete Fourier Transform with an SVM classifier.
In a multilingual country like India where 12 different official scripts are in use, automatic identification of handwritten script facilitates many important applications such as automatic transcription of multilingual documents, searching for documents on the web/digital archives containing a particular script and for the selection of script specific Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system in a multilingual environment. In this paper, we propose a robust method towards identifying scripts from the handwritten documents at text line-level. The recognition is based upon features extracted using Chain Code Histogram (CCH) and Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). The proposed method is experimented on 800 handwritten text lines written in seven Indic scripts namely, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu along with Roman script and yielded an average identification rate of 95.14% using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier.