A Complete Machine printed Gurmukhi OCR System

Recognition of Indian language scripts is a challenging problem. Work for the development of complete OCR systems for Indian language scripts is still in infancy. Complete OCR systems have recently been developed for Devanagri and Bangla scripts. Research in the field of recognition of Gurmukhi script faces major problems mainly related to the unique characteristics of the script like connectivity of characters on the headline, characters in a word present in both horizontal and vertical directions, two or more characters in a word having intersecting minimum bounding rectangles along horizontal direction, existence of a large set of visually similar character pairs, multicomponent characters, touching characters which are present even in clean documents and horizontally overlapping text segments. This paper addresses the problems in the various stages of the development of a complete OCR for Gurmukhi script and discusses potential solutions. A multi-font Gurmukhi OCR for printed text with an accuracy of more than 97% at character level is presented.