Multi-script line identification from Indian documents

A document page may contain two or more different scripts. For Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of such a document page, it is necessary to separate different scripts before feeding them to their individual OCR system. In this paper an automatic scheme is presented to identify text lines of different Indian scripts from a document. For the separation task at first the scripts are grouped into a few classes according to script characteristics. Next feature based on water reservoir principle, contour tracing, profile etc. are employed to identify them without any expensive OCR-like algorithms. At present, the system has an overall accuracy of about 97.52%.