A data acquisition and analysis system for palm leaf documents in Telugu

This paper briefly reviews the progress in the field of hand written character recognition (HWCR) applied to the Indian languages with a special emphasis on the palm leaf character recognition (PLCR) techniques. The various methodologies and techniques for character recognition (CR) have been discussed in the paper. HWCR applied to historical documents like Palm leaves and old hand written manuscripts is much more challenging due to the limited progress in this area. These documents containing texts and treaties on a host of subjects are of both national and historical importance. Characters on the palm leaf have the additional properties like depth, an added feature which can be gainfully exploited during Palm Leaf Character Recognition (PLCR). The unique method of data collection initiated with isolated Telugu characters from palm leaf manuscripts, and the building of the palm leaf character database is described in this paper. A comparative analysis of the results for PLCR obtained by various techniques are also presented.