OCR for Devanagari (Hindi / Marathi / Sanskrit)

Question

Does anybody have any idea about any recent work being done on optical character recognition for Indian scripts using modern Machine Learning techniques ? I know of some research being done at ISI, calcutta, but nothing new has come up in the last 3-4 years to the best of my knowledge, and OCR for Devanagari is sadly lacking!

Jonjona

google scholar gives me a lot of hits for 'ocr hindi'.. maybe you could pick one of these papers and email the authors asking if they could point you to places/people still working on these problems – Ungrateful

Paid OCR software is available, indsenz.com/int/index.php?content=download_area – Williemaewillies

questions about suggestions are off-topic here. It should be on softwarerecs.stackexchange.com – Hognut

Answer 1

This is surely too old to be useful, but is cool: a video of the Ingalls speaking on Sanskrit and OCR. (Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Sr., Sanskrit professor and translator, and his son Dan Ingalls, computer scientist involved with Smalltalk etc.) The first half is Ingalls Sr. describing a project to automatically analyze text, and the second is by Ingalls Jr. describing how he implemented OCR for Sanskrit from scratch.

Wuhsien

An anonymous user proposed adding this link to the answer: tdil-dc.in/eocr/index.html (I think it was intended to be a separate answer of its own, not an edit to this answer, so I'm leaving it here) – Wuhsien

BTW these days we get good results with the Google Cloud Vision API: cloud.google.com/vision/docs/drag-and-drop – Wuhsien

Answer 2

FYI: There's an article in the New York Times from 2003 referencing a tool called ILT.

Photoperiod