Sanskrit OCR

[Lars Martin Fosse]

At 07:48 7.07.97 BST, you wrote:
>I think I am safe in assuming that no-one has yet developed an optical
>character recognition (OCR) system for the devanagari script.
>
>I know that DHH Ingalls and his son had worked on the problem some 20 years
>ago, but I have not heard any more about it.
>
>In any case, does anyone know of an OCR system that is accurate for roman
>transliteration.  Has anyone tried to input text in this way?

I remember when I was in Tuebingen some years ago (1992 i think) I was told
that they had managed to "teach" the OCR program Optopus (spelling correct)
to scan devanagari. I had been fairly difficult, and there had been rather a
lot of errors. But in principle, Optopus could be taught to recognize any
pattern as a letter or a combination of lettes. I used it to scan a
romanized Sanskrit text and taught it to give cerebral t's, d's etc. as .t,
.d etc. It worked reasonable well.

Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse


Dr.art. Lars Martin Fosse
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