Optically processed Kannada script realization with Siamese neural network model

Abstract

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a technology that allows computers to recognize and extract text from images or scanned documents. It is commonly used to convert printed or handwritten text into machine-readable format. This Study presents an OCR system on Kannada Characters based on siamese neural network (SNN). Here the SNN, a Deep neural network which comprises of two identical convolutional neural network (CNN) compare the script and ranks based on the dissimilarity. When lesser dissimilarity score is identified, prediction is done as character match. In this work the authors use 5 classes of Kannada characters which were initially preprocessed using grey scaling and convert it to pgm format. This is directly input into the Deep convolutional network which is learnt from matching and non-matching image between the CNN with contrastive loss function in Siamese architecture. The Proposed OCR system uses very less time and gives more accurate results as compared to the regular CNN. The model can become a powerful tool for identification, particularly in situations where there is a high degree of variation in writing styles or limited training data is available.