1. Approaches to Recognition for Telugu Script: Fringe Distances and Other Methods
Atul Negi and Ravi Raj Singh
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Hyderabad

2. Optical Character Recognition
OCR is an enabling technology for languages
Potential for office automation and content creation activities
Transform paper media into searchable and computer revisable text format

3. OCR in Indian Scripts -I
Complete Bangla OCR (Pal and Chaudhuri 1999)
Devnagari and Bangla OCR (Chaudhuri et al 2000)
Devanagari OCR (Bansal and Sinha 1999)

4. OCR in Indian Scripts -II
Gurmukhi OCR (Lehal et al 2000)
Tamil OCR ( AG Ramakrishna 2002, V Krishnamoorthy 2001)
Kannada OCR (PS Sastry 1999, AG Ramakrishna 2002)

5. Recognition Approaches
OCR Efforts in Telugu
Recognition Approaches
Rajasekharan and Deekshatulu 1977
Sukhswami, Seetharamulu , and Pujari 1995
Negi, Chakravarthy and Krishna 2001
Pujari et al 2002
Vasantha and Patvardhan 2002

6. Telugu Script Difficulties
Rounded Nature
Lack of vertical strokes
Placement of ottulu and matra
Merging of glyphs
Fonts with varied stroke thickness

7. Fringe Distances Template Matching Approach
Needs storage of Fixed Size Templates
Connected components (CC) isolated from lines and words in the image
Each input CC is scaled to Template size

8. Fringe Formation
Fringes are point distances to image pixels stored for each training template character.
Fringes speed up template matching.

9. Run Number Based Metric Distance
Technique used for Bangla/Devanagari
JH(X, Y) = Σ |nX(i) – nY(i)| (1)
J(X, Y) = JH(X, Y) + JV(X, Y) (2)
Invariant to scaling
Robust to font style changes

10. Recognition Results Data Five image files More than 5000 input glyphs
Accuracy Comparison
Data
Five image files
More than 5000 input glyphs

11. Recognition Time
Run on Linux system Pentium 3 system

12. Conclusions Accuracy for fringe distances is marginally superior
Time taken by RNM is marginally superior
Further testing required on very varied fonts styles to make definite statements
Thank You