On how to describe shapes of Devanagari characters and use them for recognition

The paper presents a schema for the description of shapes of Devanagari characters and its application in their recognition. It exploits certain features of the script in both reducing the search space and creating a reference with respect to which correspondence could be established, during the matching process. The description prototypes are constructed using the real-life script after segmentation so that the aberrations introduced during the inevitable process of segmentation get accounted for in the description. This has been tested on printed Devanagari text with a success of approximately 70% without any post-processing and 88% correct recognition with the help of a word dictionary