Wavelet Descriptors for Recognition of 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.