HVS inspired system for script identification in Indian multi-script documents

Abstract

Identification of the script of the text, present in multi-script documents, is one of the important first steps in the design of an OCR system. Much work has been reported relating to Roman, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Japanese scripts. Though some work has already been reported involving Indian scripts, the work is still in its nascent stage. For example, most of the work assumes that the script changes only at the level of the line, which is rarely an acceptable assumption in the Indian scenario. In this work, we report a script identification algorithm, which takes into account the fact that the script changes at the word level in most Indian bilingual or multilingual documents. Initially, we deal with the identification of the script of words, using Gabor filters, in a blscript scenario. Later, we extend this to tri-script and then, five-script scenarios. The combination of Gabor features with nearest neighbor classifier shows promising results. Words of different font styles and sizes are used, We have shown that our identification scheme, inspired from the Human Visual System (HVS), utilizing the same feature and classifier combination, works consistently well for any of the combination of scripts experimented. © Springer.Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.