Towards Searchable Digital Urdu Libraries - A Word Spotting Based Retrieval Approach

Libraries in South Asia hold huge collections of valuable printed documents in Urdu and it is of interest to digitize these collections to make them more accessible. The unavailability of an OCR for Urdu however limits the concept of a digital Urdu library to scanning of documents only, offering very limited search facility based on manually assigned tags. We address this issue by proposing a word spotting based keyword search method for information retrieval in digitized collections of printed Urdu documents. The proposed method is based on segmentation of Urdu text in to partial words and representing each partial word by a set of features. To search a specific word (or phrase), the user provides a query in the form of an image. Comparing the features of the partial words in the query image with the ones already indexed, the user is provided with a list of documents containing occurrences of the queried word. The system evaluated on 50 Urdu documents exhibited a recall of 95.17% and a precision of 94.3%.