Zone Identification for Gujarati Handwritten Word

The research activity related to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for almost all Indian languages needs more attention. The Gujarati language is no exception. This paper describes an important phase of OCR namely zone identification for Gujarati words. The zone identification is used to extract modifiers in the upper side of the base character called upper zone containing upper modifiers and lower side of the base character called lower zone containing lower modifiers. Detection of upper zone and lower zone will lead to detection of middle zone which contains most of the basic characters, conjunct characters and few modifiers, if any, as part of middle zone. The paper describes a process based on distance transform for identifying various zones for handwritten Gujarati words.