Development of a Recognizer for Bangla Text: Present Status and Future Challenges

Abstract

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) System, by virtue of its usefulness, has emerged as a major research area since 1950. Now it is becoming a more challenging issue all over the world to have efficient and more accurate recognizers. There are many widely spoken languages in the world like Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, English, Spanish, Bangla, Russian, Japanese etc. Bangla is one of the most widely spoken languages, ranking 5th in the world. 21st February is observed as the international mother language day to pay homage to the martyrs fought for the establishment of Bangla as the mother tongue of Bangladesh. With the automation everywhere, it is a burning issue to digitize huge, volume of Bangla documents by using an efficient OCR. However as of today there is no such good recognizer available for Bangla compared to other languages. From 80s, it took huge interest and now becomes as a major research area particularly in Bangladesh and India. Lots of works have been done in different sections of pattern recognition tasks (i.e, pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction, classification) but there is a lack of synchronization between these works. That is why we put our effort into a comprehensive review of the current status of research to develop an all-inclusive Bangla OCR which will enable one to understand the difficulties and challenges involved, to know how much progress has been done and to estimate what more to be done to come out with a successful Bangla OCR.