A Study of Different Kinds of Degradation in Printed Gurmukhi Script

The performance of any OCR system heavily depends upon printing quality of the input document. Many OCRs have been designed which correctly identify fine printed documents both in Indian and foreign scripts. But little reported work has been found on the recognition of the degraded documents. The performance of standard machine printed OCR system working for fine printed documents decreases, if it is tested on degraded documents. The degradation in any document can be of many types. In this paper, we have identified different kinds of degradation available in printed Gurmukhi script. After identifying the different kinds of degradation, problems associated with each kind of degradation have been discussed; some possible solutions have also been discussed. This paper is extremely useful for researchers engaged in recognizing the degraded documents in any script, because same kinds of degradation can be found in most of the scripts of the world