1 DOCUMENT IMAGE ANALYSIS: WITH SPECIFIC APPLICATION TO TAMIL NEWSPRINT

We present an early version of a complete Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for Tamil newsprint. All the standard elements of OCR process like deskewing, preprocessing, segmentation, character recognition and reconstruction are implemented. Experience with OCR problems teaches that for most subtasks involved in OCR, there is no single technique that gives perfect results for every type of document image. We have used the strength of artificial neural networks in empirical model building for solving the key problems of segmentation and character recognition. Text segmentation of Tamil newsprint poses a new challenge owing to its italic-like font type; problems that arise in segmenting such text are discussed. The final document is reconstructed in HTML document forma