Optical Character Recognition (OCR) System for ancient epigraphs helps in understanding the past glory. The system designed here, takes a scanned image of Kannada epigraph as its input, which is preprocessed and segmented to obtain noise-free characters. Fourier features are extracted for the characters and used as the feature vectors for classification. The SVM, ANN, k-NN, Naive Bayes (NB) classifiers are trained with different instances of ancient Kannada characters of Ashoka and Hoysala period. Finally, OCR system is tested on epigraphical characters of 250 from Ashoka and 200 from Hoysala period. The prediction analysis of SVM, ANN, k-NN and NB classifiers is made using performance metrics such as Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and Specificity.
Ancient inscriptions which reveal the details of yester years are difficult to interpret by modern readers and efforts are being made in automating such tasks of deciphering historical records. The Kannada script which is used to write in Kannada language has gradually evolved from the ancient script known as Brahmi. Kannada script has traveled a long way from the earlier Brahmi model and has undergone a number of changes during the regimes of Ashoka, Shatavahana, Kadamba, Ganga, Rashtrakuta, Chalukya, Hoysala , Vijayanagara and Wodeyar dynasties. In this paper we discuss on Classification of ancient Kannada Scripts during three different periods Ashoka, Kadamba and Satavahana. A reconstructed grayscale ancient Kannada epigraph image is input, which is binarized using Otsu's method. Normalized Central and Zernike Moment features are extracted for classification. The RF Classifier designed is tested on handwritten base characters belonging to Ashoka, Satavahana and Kadamba dynasties. For each dynasty, 105 handwritten samples with 35 base characters are considered. The classification rates for the training and testing base characters from Satavahana period, for varying number of trees and thresholds of RF are determined. Finally a Comparative analysis of the Classification rates is made for the designed RF with SVM and k-NN classifiers, for the ancient Kannada base characters from 3 different eras Ashoka, Kadamba and Satavahana period.
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