Offline Handwritten Gurmukhi Script Recognition

Abstract

Over the last few years, a good number of laboratories all over the world have been involved in research on handwriting recognition. Handwriting recognition is a complex problem owing to the issues of variations in writing styles and size of the characters etc. The main objective of this work is to develop an offline handwritten Gurmukhi script recognition system. Gurmukhi is the script used for writing Punjabi language which is widely spoken in certain regions of north India. This thesis is divided into eight chapters. A brief outline of each chapter is given in the following paragraphs. The first chapter introduces the process of OCR and various phases of OCR like digitization, pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction, classification and post-processing. Applications of offline handwritten character recognition system are also discussed in this chapter. In an overview of Gurmukhi script, the nature of handwriting in Gurmukhi script and character set of Gurmukhi script has also been presented. Major contributions and assumptions in this research work have also been discussed in this chapter. Chapter 2 contains a review of literature on various methods used for non-Indian and Indian scripts recognition. In this chapter, a detailed literature survey on established procedures for numeral and character recognition techniques has been presented. We have reviewed literature for different scripts, namely, Arabic, Bangla, Devanagari, French, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Japanese, Malayalam, Oriya, Roman, Tamil, Telugu and Thai in this thesis. Chapter 3 describes essential phases of an offline handwritten Gurmukhi script recognition system. These have been discussed in four sections entitled data collection phase, digitization phase, pre-processing phase and segmentation phase. In data collection phase, we have collected 300 samples of offline handwritten Gurmukhi script documents. These documents have been divided into three categories.