An Online Character Recognition System to Convert Grantha Script to Malayalam

TL;DR

This paper introduces an online character recognition system that converts Grantha script into Malayalam, demonstrating high accuracy rates on manuscripts and printed pages, thus bridging ancient and modern South Indian scripts.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel online recognition framework for Grantha script, utilizing time-domain features, and maps recognized characters to Malayalam, achieving high recognition accuracy.

Findings

Recognition rate for manuscripts: 92.11% (Grantha)

Recognition rate for printed pages: 96.16% (Grantha)

System demonstrates high efficiency and accuracy.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to recognize Grantha, an ancient script in South India and converting it to Malayalam, a prevalent language in South India using online character recognition mechanism. The motivation behind this work owes its credit to (i) developing a mechanism to recognize Grantha script in this modern world and (ii) affirming the strong connection among Grantha and Malayalam. A framework for the recognition of Grantha script using online character recognition is designed and implemented. The features extracted from the Grantha script comprises mainly of time-domain features based on writing direction and curvature. The recognized characters are mapped to corresponding Malayalam characters. The framework was tested on a bed of medium length manuscripts containing 9-12 sample lines and printed pages of a book titled Soundarya Lahari writtenin Grantha by Sri Adi Shankara to recognize the words and sentences. The manuscript recognition rates with the system are for Grantha as 92.11%, Old Malayalam 90.82% and for new Malayalam script 89.56%. The recognition rates of pages of the printed book are for Grantha as 96.16%, Old Malayalam script 95.22% and new Malayalam script as 92.32% respectively. These results show the efficiency of the developed system.