Odia Offline Typewritten Character Recognition using Template Matching with Unicode Mapping

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a document image analysis method where scanned digital image that contains either machine printed or handwritten scripts are input into a system to translate it into an editable machine readable digital text format. Hence OCR has been a highly challenging topic of interest for researchers all around the globe and also research paper involving OCR that works under all possible conditions and gives highly accurate results. It is seen that efficient algorithms have increased the speed and accuracy of character recognition. A substantial amount of work has been done on foreign languages such as English, Chinese etc. but very few paper are there for Indian languages baring a few for Hindi and Bengali. Hence our research work was directed towards development of a novel algorithm for Offline Typewritten Odia Character Recognition using Template Matching with Unicode Mapping.