Integrated segmentation and recognition of connected Ottoman script

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Yalniz I. Z., Altingovde İ. S., Gudukbay U., Ulusoy O.

OPTICAL ENGINEERING, vol.48, no.11, 2009 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 48 Issue: 11
  • Publication Date: 2009
  • Doi Number: 10.1117/1.3262346
  • Journal Name: OPTICAL ENGINEERING
  • Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus
  • Keywords: optical character recognition, historical document analysis, connected scripts, information retrieval, ARABIC CHARACTER-RECOGNITION, INVERTED FILES, RETRIEVAL, DOCUMENTS
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: No

Abstract

We propose a novel context-sensitive segmentation and recognition method for connected letters in Ottoman script. This method first extracts a set of segments from a connected script and determines the candidate letters to which extracted segments are most similar. Next, a function is defined for scoring each different syntactically correct sequence of these candidate letters. To find the candidate letter sequence that maximizes the score function, a directed acyclic graph is constructed. The letters are finally recognized by computing the longest path in this graph. Experiments using a collection of printed Ottoman documents reveal that the proposed method provides >90% precision and recall figures in terms of character recognition. In a further set of experiments, we also demonstrate that the framework can be used as a building block for an information retrieval system for digital Ottoman archives. (C) 2009 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [DOI: 10.1117/1.3262346]