An OCR system for Telugu

Telugu is the language spoken by more than 100 million people of South India. Telugu has a complex orthography with a large number of distinct character shapes (estimated to be of the order of 10,000) composed of simple and compound characters formed from 16 vowels (called achchus) and 36 consonants (called hallus). We present an efficient and practical approach to Telugu OCR which limits the number of templates to be recognized to just 370, avoiding issues of classifier design for thousands of shapes or very complex glyph segmentation. A compositional approach using connected components and fringe distance template matching was tested to give a raw OCR accuracy of about 92%. Several experiments across varying fonts and resolutions showed the approach to be satisfactory.