Optical Character Recognition

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is one of the challenging areas of pattern recognition. It gained popularity among the research community due to its vast application potentials. Extensive research has been done on OCR evidenced by a large number of research articles published in the literature during the last few decades. Most of the research works reported in this area are for Roman, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic scripts. The number of research works on recognition of characters of Indian scripts is not sufficient keeping in view the variety of Indian scripts. There are 12 major scripts for 16 major Indian languages. There are many commercial OCRs available nowadays and most of them work for Roman, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic characters. This chapter presents an overview of OCR research and development. OCRs on Indian language scripts are given more emphasis in this chapter and special attention is given to the statistical moment-based character recognition methods.