Bilingual Malayalam – English OCR System Using Singular Values and Frequency Capture Approach

In India, bilingual documentation is very common especially in government forms and formats, technical documents, reports, postal documents, railways reservation forms etc., Printed documents having a single Indian language often contain English words and numerals since English is considered as a link language in India. The proposed system is designed to recognize bilingual script having Malayalam and English interspersed at word-level. This problem was considered as it is more realistic. Here, a combined database approach is employed, the scripts involved are treated alike and hence a single OCR is sufficient for recognition of bilingual script. The inherent advantage of the system is that the recognition of Malayalam, English words and numerals present in a bilingual document was achieved without performing script identification initially. This method avoids the script identification process which is computationally expensive. The proposed system achieves a recognition rate of 97.5% and 98.5 % for the two feature extraction approaches respectively.