Character and numeral recognition for non-Indic and Indic scripts: a survey

A collection of different scripts is employed in writing languages throughout the world. Character and numeral recognition of a particular script is a key area in the field of pattern recognition. In this paper, we have presented a comprehensive survey on character and numeral recognition of non-Indic and Indic scripts. Many researchers have done work on character and numeral recognition from the most recent couple of years. In perspective of this, few strategies for character/numeral have been developed so far. There are an immense number of frameworks available for printed and handwritten character recognition for non-Indic scripts. But, only a limited number of systems are offered for character/numeral recognition of Indic scripts. However, few endeavors have been made on the recognition of Bangla, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Oriya and Tamil scripts. In this paper, we have additionally examined major challenges/issues for character/numeral recognition. The efforts in two directions (non-Indic and Indic scripts) are reflected in this paper. When compared with non-Indic scripts, the research on character recognition of Indic scripts has not achieved that perfection yet. The techniques used for recognition of non-Indic scripts may be used for recognition of Indic scripts (printed/handwritten text) and vice versa to improve the recognition rates. It is also noticed that the research in this field is quietly thin and still more research is to be done, particularly in the case of handwritten Indic scripts documents.