Script Identification – A Han and Roman Script Perspective

All Han-based scripts (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) possess similar visual characteristics. Hence system development for identification of Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts from a single document page is quite challenging. It is noted that a Han-based document page might also have Roman script in them. A multi-script OCR system dealing with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Roman scripts, demands identification of scripts before execution of respective OCR modules. We propose a system to address this problem using directional features along with a Gaussian Kernel-based Support Vector Machine. We got promising results of 98.39% script identification accuracy at character level and 99.85% at block level, when no rejection was considered.