OCR for historical Kannada documents using clustering methods

Abstract

Motivation: In India, the Language Kannada is an ancient and official language in Karnataka State. The study of ancient Kannada scripts from stone carvings, leaf, metal, cloth, paper and other sources enhances our knowledge on the traditions and culture practiced in Karnataka. Due to Poor Quality, variability and the contrast, the Kannada ancient scripts become very challenging to extract the information or to recognize the characters. Objectives: To design a suitable Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technique to read ancient Kannada scripts. Method: Clustering by fast search and find of density peaks is a state-of-the-art density-based clustering algorithm that can effectively find clusters with arbitrary shapes. However, it requires to calculate the distances between all the points in a data set to determine the density and separation of each point. Consequently, its computational cost is extremely high in the case of large-scale data sets. In this work the given document is preprocessed. The features alike SIFT and SURF are extracted and clustered using K-Means clustering. The similarity is computed using different measures. Findings: The classification accuracy was studied under different clustering methods like Kmeans, Agglomerative, Density based clustering with distance based measures like Euclidean and Manhattan. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we created our own database of Ashok, Kadamba, Hoysala and Mysuru scripts and experiment was conducted in a database of 4 classes under 70, 50 and 30 different training models from each class. Novelty: We propose a K-means clustering using SIFT and SURF for Kannada ancient manuscript.

Recognition and Translation of Ancient South Arabian Musnad Inscriptions

“…This method was introduced because of the low accuracy of inscriptions images using OCR. In addition, [9] suggested a k number of clusters (kmeans clustering) for an ancient Kannada text using scaleinvariant Fourier transform (SIFT) and speeded up robust features (SURF). Moreover, in [10], OCR was used to identify ancient Tamil inscriptions on stone using a feature extracted with the SIFT algorithm.…”