A survey on offline handwritten north Indian script symbol recognition

Abstract

North Indian scripts are used in 70% of the regions of India. Devanagari, Bangla, Gujarati, Oriya, and Gurumukhi are the major North Indian scripts listed in decreasing order of their usage. There are ample amount of work done on printed symbol recognition for various North Indian scripts, but handwritten symbol recognition still needs further attention. This paper represents the thorough study of the work done so far for handwritten symbol recognition for major North Indian script. Furthermore, the challenges of each script and various feature extraction techniques and classifiers used are also discussed. The paper will provide a proper startup and almost complete scenario of the state of the art in offline handwritten symbol recognition from North Indian script.