Offline handwriting recognition in Indian regional scripts is an interesting area of research as almost 460 million people in India use regional scripts. The nine major Indian regional scripts are Bangla (for Bengali and Assamese languages), Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Gurumukhi (for Punjabi language), Tamil, Telugu, and Nastaliq (for Urdu language). A state-of-the-art survey about the techniques available in the area of offline handwriting recognition (OHR) in Indian regional scripts will be of a great aid to the researchers in the subcontinent and hence a sincere attempt is made in this article to discuss the advancements reported in this regard during the last few decades. The survey is organized into different sections. A brief introduction is given initially about automatic recognition of handwriting and official regional scripts in India. The nine regional scripts are then categorized into four subgroups based on their similarity and evolution information. The first group contains Bangla, Oriya, Gujarati and Gurumukhi scripts. The second group contains Kannada and Telugu scripts and the third group contains Tamil and Malayalam scripts. The fourth group contains only Nastaliq script (Perso-Arabic script for Urdu), which is not an Indo-Aryan script. Various feature extraction and classification techniques associated with the offline handwriting recognition of the regional scripts are discussed in this survey. As it is important to identify the script before the recognition step, a section is dedicated to handwritten script identification techniques. A benchmarking database is very important for any pattern recognition related research. The details of the datasets available in different Indian regional scripts are also mentioned in the article. A separate section is dedicated to the observations made, future scope, and existing difficulties related to handwriting recognition in Indian regional scripts. We hope that this survey will serve as a compendium not only for researchers in India, but also for policymakers and practitioners in India. It will also help to accomplish a target of bringing the researchers working on different Indian scripts together. Looking at the recent developments in OHR of Indian regional scripts, this article will provide a better platform for future research activities.

Handwriting Recognition in Indian Regional Scripts: A Survey of Offline Techniques

We present the design and implementation of a vision based autonomous landing algorithm using a downward looking camera. To demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms we emulate the dynamics of the ship-deck, for various sea states and different ships using a six degrees of freedom motion platform. We then present the design and implementation of our robust computer vision system to measure the pose of the shipdeck with respect to the vehicle. A Kalman filter is used in conjunction with our vision system to ensure the robustness of the estimates. We demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of our system to occlusions, variation in intensity, etc. using our testbed.

An Approach Toward Visual Autonomous Ship Board Landing of a VTOL UAV

A collection of different scripts is employed in writing languages throughout the world. Character and numeral recognition of a particular script is a key area in the field of pattern recognition. In this paper, we have presented a comprehensive survey on character and numeral recognition of non-Indic and Indic scripts. Many researchers have done work on character and numeral recognition from the most recent couple of years. In perspective of this, few strategies for character/numeral have been developed so far. There are an immense number of frameworks available for printed and handwritten character recognition for non-Indic scripts. But, only a limited number of systems are offered for character/numeral recognition of Indic scripts. However, few endeavors have been made on the recognition of Bangla, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Oriya and Tamil scripts. In this paper, we have additionally examined major challenges/issues for character/numeral recognition. The efforts in two directions (non-Indic and Indic scripts) are reflected in this paper. When compared with non-Indic scripts, the research on character recognition of Indic scripts has not achieved that perfection yet. The techniques used for recognition of non-Indic scripts may be used for recognition of Indic scripts (printed/handwritten text) and vice versa to improve the recognition rates. It is also noticed that the research in this field is quietly thin and still more research is to be done, particularly in the case of handwritten Indic scripts documents.

Character and numeral recognition for non-Indic and Indic scripts: a survey

Incremental face recognition for large-scale social network services

In Indian scenario, a document analysis system has to support multiple languages at the same time. With emerging multilingualism in urban India, often bilingual, trilingual or even more languages need to be supported. This demands development of a multilingual OCR system which can work seamlessly across Indic scripts. In our approach the script is identified at word level, prior to the recognition of the word. An end-to-end RNN based architecture which can detect the script and recognize the text in a segmentation-free manner is proposed for this purpose. We demonstrate the approach for 12 Indian languages and English. It is observed that, even with the similar architecture, performance on Indian languages are poorer compared to English. We investigate this further. Our approach is evaluated on a large corpus comprising of thousands of pages. The Hindi OCR is compared with other popular OCRs for the language, as a further testimony for the efficacy of our method.

Multilingual OCR for Indic Scripts

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been effectively developed for the recognition of printed characters of non-Indian languages. Efforts are on the way for the development of efficient OCR systems for Indian languages, especially for Kannada, a popular South Indian language. We present in this paper an OCR system developed for the recognition of basic characters (vowels and consonants) in printed Kannada text, which can handle different font sizes and font types. Hu’s invariant moments and Zernike moments that have been progressively used in pattern recognition are used in our system to extract the features of printed Kannada characters. Neural classifiers have been effectively used for the classification of characters based on moment features. An encouraging recognition rate of 96.8% has been obtained. The system methodology can be extended for the recognition of other south Indian languages, especially for Telugu.

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A simple and efficient optical character recognition system for basic symbols in printed Kannada text

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been effectively developed for the recognition of printed characters of non-Indian languages. Efforts are underway for the development of efficient OCR systems for Indian languages, especially for Kannada, a popular South Indian language. We present in this paper an OCR system developed for the recognition of basic characters in printed Kannada text, which can handle different font sizes and font sets. Wavelets that have been progressively used in pattern recognition and on-line character recognition systems are used in our system to extract the features of printed Kannada characters. Neural classifiers have been effectively used for the classification of characters based on wavelet features. The system methodology can be extended for the recognition of other south Indian languages, especially for Telugu.

Wavelet descriptors for recognition of basic symbols in printed kannada text

This paper presents an off-line handwritten recognition system for numerals that is independent of the script. Numeral set from five major Indian language and English language are selected for recognition. Wavelets that have been progressively used in pattern recognition and many character recognition systems are used in our system to extract the features of numerals. Neural classifiers have been effectively used for the classification of numerals. An overall recognition rate of 92.3% has been obtained. The recognition scheme in general can be used for any language and particularly for applications like postal address automation.

Script independent handwritten numeral recognition

—Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) is a special form of data hiding approach for data integrity and confidentiality protection where the secret image bits (SI) are embedded into Cover Media (CM) by altering its intrinsic pixel attributes. However, in RDH the CM along with the secret message is recovered at the end of computing phase. However, despite of its potential use-cases for enhancing the embedding performance, when it comes to security for various network standards, the traditional RDH mechanisms cannot fully comply with the standards for different set of attacks during the bit-stream transmission scenarios. Therefore, the proposed study contributes towards a computational framework of a robust RDH framework for Video Steganography (VS) which is modeled and simulated under various attack effects and the observation outcome are produced in before and after attack situations to justify the improvement over Embedding Capacity (EC) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) performance for both CM and secret message unlike traditional difference expansion-based methods (DE). The outcome of the study shows that the formulated RDH method not only achieves better reversibility at lower cost of computing but also ensures effective PSNR and imperceptibility outcome for both CM and secret image.

R. Sanjeev Kunte

Papers

A simple and efficient optical character recognition system for basic symbols in printed Kannada text

Wavelet descriptors for recognition of basic symbols in printed kannada text

Script independent handwritten numeral recognition

A Robust Reversible Data Hiding Framework for Video Steganography Applications