A Literature Survey on Digital Image Processing Techniques in Character Recognition of Indian Languages

Handwritten character recognition is always a frontier area of research in the field of pattern recognition. There is a large demand for OCR on hand written documents in Image processing. Even though, sufficient studies have performed in foreign scripts like Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, only a very few work can be traced for handwritten character recognition mainly for the south Indian scripts. OCR system development for Indian script has many application areas like preserving manuscripts and ancient literatures written in different Indian scripts and making digital libraries for the documents. Feature extraction and classification are essential steps of character recognition process affecting the overall accuracy of the recognition system. This paper presents a brief overview of digital image processing techniques such as Feature Extraction, Image Restoration and Image Enhancement. A brief history of OCR and various approaches to character recognition is also discussed in this paper.