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In an effort to accelerate the development of OCR software for Devanagari (meaning "city of immortals"), CEDAR and the Indian Statistical Institute are distributing a script-recognition tool that they hope will become the international standard for Devanagari.
Their script-recognition software, which can be downloaded free at www.cedar.buffalo.edu/ILT, can separate lines and individual characters written in the flowing script.
It then offers an on-screen transliteration in Roman characters for proofreading.
Govindaraju said that in the early 1990s CEDAR gave away similar tools it had created for the United States Postal Service to analyse handwriting. "That spurred work in the Roman alphabet on handwriting recognition," he said. "There has been tremendous progress since then."
Those earlier tools allowed CEDAR to develop the first successful Roman alphabet handwriting recognition system capable of operating on a mass scale. Govindaraju said the tools became the standard for comparing results among all handwriting recognition groups.
Work by those groups also gave rise to handwriting recognition programs such as Graffiti 2, for users of some newer hand-held computers, and Microsoft Windows Journal, for users of the Windows XP tablet PCs.
Like the Roman alphabet and some Japanese and Chinese characters, Devanagari may eventually be embraced by makers of commercial recognition software.
Working from a common base for Devanagari would make it easier for researchers to exchange data from their efforts. Most of the work being done focuses on refining the recognition software to cope with variations, a task that is likely to be more complex with Devanagari script than the Roman alphabet.
With OCR technology, Sanskrit documents could be transformed into digital text that could be viewed on computer monitors using existing Devanagari screen fonts.
"Sanskrit is a dying language," Govindaraju's said, "but I love Sanskrit."
- New York Times
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