Sinhala optical character recognition for desktops

Abstract

Optical Sinhala Character recognition is a fairly researched area in the local natural language initiative. Although a fair amount of research and development has been undertaken in this field, a comprehensive product is yet to be developed. However, a Sinhala OCR has a formidable academic and commercial value. The value of such a tool is evident in the e-gonvemance intiative as well, where vast numbers of Sinhala documents, forms etc will have to be digitised. OCRs have been developed in English and many other languages, and some of these basic methodologies can be extended for a Sinhala OCR as well. A forerunning concept on OCR is the use of weighted Artificial Neural Networks. However, this method is requires heavy processing power. This abstract proposes a fresh idea to reduce processing power, using image processing and comupter vision techniques.