Script identification in printed bilingual documents

Abstract

Identification of script in multi-lingual documents is essential for many language dependent applications suchas machine translation and optical character recognition. Techniques for script identification generally require large areas for operation so that sufficient information is available. Suchassumption is nullified in Indian context, as there is an interspersion of words of two different scripts in most documents. In this paper, techniques to identify the script of a word are discussed. Two different approaches have been proposed and tested. The first method structures words into 3 distinct spatial zones and utilizes the information on the spatial spread of a word in upper and lower zones, together with the character density, in order to identify the script. The second technique analyzes the directional energy distribution of a word using Gabor filters withsuitable frequencies and orientations. Words withv arious font styles and sizes have been used for the testing of the proposed algorithms and the results obtained are quite encouraging.