A high performance domain specific OCR for Bangla script

Abstract

Research on recognizing Bengali script has been started since mid 1980's. A variety of different techniques have been applied and the performance is examined. In this paper we present a high performance domain specific OCR for recognizing Bengali script. We select the training data set from the script of the specified domain. We choose Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for character classification due to its simple and straightforward way of representation. We examine the primary error types that mainly occurred at preprocessing level and carefully handled those errors by adding special error correcting module as a part of recognizer. Finally we added a dictionary and some error specific rules to correct the probable errors after the word formation is done. The entire technique significantly increases the performance of the OCR for a specific domain to a great extent. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008.