A simple and efficient optical character recognition system for basic symbols in printed Kannada text

Abstract

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been effectively developed for the recognition of printed characters of non-Indian languages. Efforts are on the way for the development of efficient OCR systems for Indian languages, especially for Kannada, a popular South Indian language. We present in this paper an OCR system developed for the recognition of basic characters (vowels and consonants) in printed Kannada text, which can handle different font sizes and font types. Hu's invariant moments and Zernike moments that have been progressively used in pattern recognition are used in our system to extract the features of printed Kannada characters. Neural classifiers have been effectively used for the classification of characters based on moment features. An encouraging recognition rate of 96.8% has been obtained. The system methodology can be extended for the recognition of other south Indian languages, especially for Telugu. © Printed in India.