A Survey on Offline Recognition of South Indian Scripts

Handwritten character recognition is always a frontier area of research in the field of pattern recognition. Even though, sufficient studies have performed in foreign scripts like Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, only a very few work can be traced for handwritten character recognition mainly for the south Indian scripts. Multiple combinations of vowels and consonants along with its modifiers led to generation of huge number of classes with respect to character recognition systems. The feature extraction and classification of characters from such huge number of classes in south Indian language Optical Character Recognitions remains as a non-trivial problem.OCR system development for Indian script has many application areas like preserving manuscripts and ancient literatures written in different Indian scripts and making digital libraries for the documents. Feature extraction and classification are essential steps of character recognition process affecting the overall accuracy of the recognition system. This paper presents a brief overview of digital image processing techniques such as Feature Extraction and Image classification. Keywords— Feature extraction, Classification, Neural network, Support vector machine, Handwritten character recognition;