A Baybayin word recognition system.

Abstract

Baybayin is a pre-Hispanic Philippine writing system used in Luzon island. With the effort in reintroducing the script, in 2018, the Committee on Basic Education and Culture of the Philippine Congress approved House Bill 1022 or the ”National Writing System Act,” which declares the Baybayin script as the Philippines’ national writing system. Since then, Baybayin OCR has become a field of research interest. Numerous works have proposed different techniques in recognizing Baybayin scripts. However, all those studies anchored on the classification and recognition at the character level. In this work, we propose an algorithm that provides the Latin transliteration of a Baybayin word in an image. The proposed system relies on a Baybayin character classifier generated using the Support Vector Machine (SVM). The method involves isolation of each Baybayin character, then classifying each character according to its equivalent syllable in Latin script, and finally concatenate each result to form the transliterated word. The system was tested using a novel dataset of Baybayin word images and achieved a competitive 97.9% recognition accuracy. Based on our review of the literature, this is the first work that recognizes Baybayin scripts at the word level. The proposed system can be used in automated transliterations of Baybayin texts transcribed in old books, tattoos, signage, graphic designs, and documents, among others.