On OCR of Major Indian Scripts: Bangla and Devanagari

Abstract

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a key enabling technology critical to creating indexed, digital library content, and it is especially valuable for Indic scripts, for which there has been very little digital access. Indic scripts, the ancient Brahmi scripts prevalent in the Indian subcontinent, present some challenges for OCR that are different from those faced with Latin and Oriental scripts. But properly utilized, OCR will help to make Indic digital archives practically accessible to researchers and lay users alike by creating searchable indexes and machine-readable text repositories. This unique guide/reference is the very first comprehensive book on the subject of OCR for Indic scripts, providing an overview of the state-of-the-art research in this field as well as other issues related to facilitating query and retrieval of Indic documents from digital libraries. All major research groups working in this area are represented in this book, which is divided into sections on recognition of Indic scripts and retrieval of Indic documents.