Separating Indic Scripts with matra for Effective Handwritten Script Identification in Multi-Script Documents

Abstract

We present a novel approach for separating Indic scripts with ‘matra’, which is used as a precursor to advance and/or ease subsequent handwritten script identification in multi-script documents. In our study, among state-of-the-art features and classifiers, an optimized fractal geometry analysis and random forest are found to be the best performer to distinguish scripts with ‘matra’ from their counterparts. For validation, a total of 1204 document images are used, where two different scripts with ‘matra’: Bangla and Devanagari are considered as positive samples and the other two different scripts: Roman and Urdu are considered as negative samples. With this precursor, an overall script identification performance can be advanced by more than 5.13% in accuracy and 1.17 times faster in processing time as compared to conventional system.