Recognition of Ancient Tamil Palm Leaf Vowel Characters in Historical Documents using B-spline Curve Recognition

Abstract

Abstract Tamil is one of the classic languages in the world. The ancient Tamil documents on medicines, literatures, drama, astrology and many other ancient contents were written in stones and palmleaf. The character recognition of palmleaf manuscript is one of the open problems to be solved. In this paper, the recognition of B-spline curves is used to recognize the twelve vowels in the palm leaf manuscripts. The advantage of B-spline curve are uniqueness and robustness. Each vowel in Tamil language has one or more curves of different angle. Recognition of the combination of curves is used to recognize the vowels. The results show that the proposed method can recognize characters written by different narrators and the proposed method performs better than other state - of - the art methods in terms of recognition accuracy.