Offline script recognition from handwritten and printed multilingual documents: a survey

Script recognition has many real-life applications like optical character recognition, document archiving, writer identification, searching within the documents, etc. Automatic script recognition from multilingual documents is a stimulating task, where the system must identify and recognize several types of scripts that can be available on a single page. In offline script recognition, printed or handwritten documents are firstly scanned followed by the process of script recognition, whereas in online script recognition documents are already in soft-copy form. Most of the script recognition techniques presented by researchers so far are based on traditional image processing frameworks. But nowadays, it is observed that Deep Learning-based techniques are more capable of achieving a script recognition task efficiently as well as accurately. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of various techniques available for identification and recognition of multilingual scripts from the last few decades that are mainly focused on Indic scripts. However, some potential non-Indic script identification works are also incorporated for ease of understanding. We hope that this survey can act as a compendium as well as provide future directions to researchers for developing generic OCRs.