An Online Character Recognition System to Convert Grantha Script to Malayalam

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.

@article{M2012,
  title     = {An Online Character Recognition System to Convert Grantha Script to Malayalam},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {3},
  number    = {7},
  year      = {2012},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Sreeraj M and Sumam Mary Idicula},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2012.030709},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2012.030709}
}