A Novel Approach for Word Retrieval from Devanagari Document Images

Large amount of information is lying dormant in historical documents and manuscripts. This information would go futile if not stored in digital form. Searching some relevant information from these scanned images would ideally require converting these document images to text form by doing optical character recognition (OCR). For indigenous scripts of India, there are very few OCRs that can successfully recognize printed text images of varying quality, size, style and font. An alternate approach using word spotting can be effective to access large collections of document images. We propose a word spotting technique based on codes for matching the word images of Devanagari script. The shape information is utilised for generating integer codes for words in the document image and these codes are matched for final retrieval of relevant documents. The technique is illustrated using Marathi document images.