Identification of Printed Punjabi Words and English Numerals Using Gabor Features

Script identification is one of the challenging steps in the development of optical character recognition system for bilingual or multilingual documents. In this paper an attempt is made for identification of English numerals at word level from Punjabi documents by using Gabor features. The support vector machine (SVM) classifier with five fold cross validation is used to classify the word images. The results obtained are quite encouraging. Average accuracy with RBF kernel, Polynomial and Linear Kernel functions comes out to be greater than 99%.

A Study of Touching Characters in Degraded Gurmukhi Text

Character segmentation is an important preprocessing step for text recognition. In degraded documents, existence of touching characters decreases recognition rate drastically, for any optical character recognition (OCR) system. In this paper a study of touching Gurmukhi characters is carried out and these characters have been divided into various categories after a careful analysis.Structural properties of the Gurmukhi characters are used for defining the categories. New algorithms have been proposed to segment the touching characters in middle zone. These algorithms have shown a reasonable improvement in segmenting the touching characters in degraded Gurmukhi script. The algorithms proposed in this paper are applicable only to machine printed text.

Segmentation Problems and Solutions in Printed Degraded Gurmukhi Script

Character segmentation is an important preprocessing step for text recognition. In degraded documents, existence of touching characters decreases recognition rate drastically, for any optical character recognition (OCR) system. In this paper we have proposed a complete solution for segmenting touching characters in all the three zones of printed Gurmukhi script. A study of touching Gurmukhi characters is carried out and these characters have been divided into various categories after a careful analysis. Structural properties of the Gurmukhi characters are used for defining the categories. New algorithms have been proposed to segment the touching characters in middle zone, upper zone and lower zone. These algorithms have shown a reasonable improvement in segmenting the touching characters in degraded printed Gurmukhi script. The algorithms proposed in this paper are applicable only to machine printed text. We have also discussed a new and useful technique to segment the horizontally overlapping lines.