Script Identification of Pre-segmented Multi-font Characters and Digits

Abstract

Character recognition problems of distinct scripts have their own script specific characteristics. The state-of-art optical character recognition systems use different methodolgies, to recognize different script characters, which are most effective for the corresponding script. The identificaton of the script of the individual character has not brought much attention between researchers, most of the script identification work is on document, line and word level. In this multilingual/multiscript world presence of different script characters in a single document is very common. We here propose a system to encounter such adverse situation in context of English and Gurumukhi Script. Experiments on multifont and multisized characters with Gabor features based on directional frequency and Gradient features based on gradient information of an individual character to identify it as Gurumukhi or English and also as character or numeral are reported here. Treating it as four class classification problem, multi-class Support Vector Machine(One Vs One) has been used for classification. We got promising results with both types of features. The average identification rates obtained with Gabor and Gradient features are 98.9% and 99.45% respectively.