Neural Network Based Hybrid Technique Towards Recognition of Distorted Historic Broken Tamil Scripts

Document analysis and optical character recognition (OCR) systems have been under research for few decades. Especially for distorted characters, still it remains a highly challenging task to implement an OCR that works under all possible conditions and gives highly accurate results. In this paper, we investigate the application of hybrid technique that recognizes distorted broken Tamil characters. Entire application is carried out in two different phases. Parker's shape tracing along with line tracing features was included as first phase. Neural Network training along with selective thresholding minimum distance technique (MDT) for recognition was continued as second phase. The results show that the proposed hybrid technique can improve character recognition accuracy of distorted documents containing broken characters and feasible with other existing techniques, easy for extension, and may be very effective for non-headline based complex Indic scripts.