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Experiments on Urdu Text Recognition

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Guide to OCR for Indic Scripts

Part of the book series: Advances in Pattern Recognition ((ACVPR))

Abstract

Urdu is a language spoken in the Indian subcontinent by an estimated 130–270 million speakers. At the spoken level, Urdu and Hindi are considered dialects of a single language because of shared vocabulary and the similarity in grammar. At the written level, however, Urdu is much closer to Arabic because it is written in Nastaliq, the calligraphic style of the Persian–Arabic script. Therefore, a speaker of Hindi can understand spoken Urdu but may not be able to read written Urdu because Hindi is written in Devanagari script, whereas an Arabic writer can read the written words but may not understand the spoken Urdu. In this chapter we present an overview of written Urdu. Prior research in handwritten Urdu OCR is very limited. We present (perhaps) the first system for recognizing handwritten Urdu words. On a data set of about 1300 handwritten words, we achieved an accuracy of 70% for the top choice, and 82% for the top three choices.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors, University at Buffalo, 14228, Amherst, NY, USA

    Omar Mukhtar, Srirangaraj Setlur & Venu Govindaraju

Authors
  1. Omar Mukhtar
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  2. Srirangaraj Setlur
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  3. Venu Govindaraju
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Omar Mukhtar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Analysis & Recognition (CEDAR), Center of Excellence for Document, Lee Entrance 520, Amherst, 14228, U.S.A.

    Venu Govindaraju

  2. Analysis & Recognition (CEDAR), Center of Excellence for Document, Lee Entrance 520, Amherst, 14228, U.S.A.

    Srirangaraj (Ranga) Setlur

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag London Limited

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Mukhtar, O., Setlur, S., Govindaraju, V. (2009). Experiments on Urdu Text Recognition. In: Govindaraju, V., Setlur, S. (eds) Guide to OCR for Indic Scripts. Advances in Pattern Recognition. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-330-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-330-9_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-84800-329-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-84800-330-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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