An optical character recognition system for printed Telugu text

Telugu is one of the oldest and popular languages of India, spoken by more than 66 million people, especially in South India. Not much work has been reported on the development of optical character recognition (OCR) systems for Telugu text. Therefore, it is an area of current research. Some characters in Telugu are made up of more than one connected symbol. Compound characters are written by associating modifiers with consonants, resulting in a huge number of possible combinations, running into hundreds of thousands. A compound character may contain one or more connected symbols. Therefore, systems developed for documents of other scripts, like Roman, cannot be used directly for the Telugu language.