A Survey on Devanagari Character Recognition

Abstract

Development of optical character recognition (OCR) algorithm for printed and handwritten characters is a challenging area for research. Plentiful research on OCR techniques for scripts such as Roman, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese has already been carried out. OCR research activities related to Indian script is limited. Devanagari script is used by about 500 million people in India. Remarkable research has been done in the last few years for Devanagari script. In this paper, a survey of the various research efforts done by various groups of researchers for the development of printed as well as handwritten Devanagari character recognition system is presented. Comparison of various methods in terms of feature extraction techniques, classifiers, datasets, and accuracy values is also described.