Creation of data resources and design of an evaluation test bed for Devanagari script recognition

The Indian subcontinent has a large number of languages, dialects, and scripts with the Devanagari script being the primary and most widely used of all the scripts. To date, much of the Devanagari optical character recognition (OCR) research has been restricted to a handful of groups. So, techniques have not yet been widely disseminated or evaluated independently and automated evaluation tools are currently not available for lack of a standard representation of ground-truth and result data. A key reason for the absence of sustained research efforts in off-line Devanagari OCR appears to be the paucity of data resources. Ground truthed data for words and characters, on-line dictionaries, corpora of text documents and reliable, standardized statistical analyses and evaluation tools are currently lacking. So, the creation of such data resources will undoubtedly provide a much needed fillip to researchers working on Devanagari OCR. This paper describes a National Science Foundation sponsored project under the International Digital Libraries program to create data resources that will facilitate development of Devanagari OCR technology and provide a standardized test bed and evaluation tools for Devanagari script recognition.