Form Field Frame Boundary Removal for Form Processing System in Gurmukhi Script

Machine recognition of hand-filled forms is a challenging task. Form processing involves many activities including form field location, field frame boundary removal and data image extraction, segmentation, feature extraction, classification and recognition. The paper proposes an algorithm for removal of the field frame boundary of the hand filled forms in Gurmukhi Script. Because of the structural characteristics of the Gurmukhi script, use of headline and varied writing styles, the filled data may overlap or get merged with the field frame boundaries, which make the field data extraction task very challenging. It becomes particularly difficult to remove the field frame boundaries while preserving the filled in data. Experimental results reveal the efficiency of the proposed method in removing the field frame boundary and extracting the field data from form documents. Though, the algorithm has been developed and tested for Gurmukhi script but with minor or no changes it can be applied to scripts having structural features similar to that of Gurmukhi script, like Bangla and Devnagari.