Ancient Tamil Character Recognition from Stone Inscriptions – A Theoretical Analysis

Character recognition on inscriptions is an area which explores our knowledge of an ancient language. Inscriptions were done in all kinds of environments. This work focuses on recognizing Tamil language characters on stone-based images. From the inscription images, we come to know about the importance of old century languages. Some of the general challenges researchers face in recognizing the characters in stone inscriptions are differentiating the foreground pixel from the background stone images, perspective distortion, different light illumination, the same kind of background/foreground, damaged stones, lack of shape and size of the text. Despite the different ways proposed by the researchers, obstacles and issues continue to exist. This survey attempts to give a detailed analysis of the recent research works on character recognition from the images of stone inscriptions with a special reference to Tamil. It details the methods applied for preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. It gives a road map for future researchers who wish to carry out research in this area.