Script Identification for Printed and Handwritten Indian Documents: An Empirical Study of Different Feature Classifier Combinations

The identification of script in a document page image is the first step for an OCR system processing multi-script documents. In this multilingual/multiscript world, document processing systems relying on the OCR that need human involvement to select the appropriate OCR package is definitely undesirable and inefficient. The development of robust and efficient methods for automatic script identification of a document is a subject of major importance for automatic document processing in a multilingual/multiscript environment. Thus, the basic objective is to come up with some intuitive methods having straightforward implementation without compromising with efficiency. The aim of this work is to evaluate state-of-the-art feature extraction and classification techniques in the field of automatic script identification of printed and handwritten documents and to propose the best combination for the same.