International Journal of Information Technology (IJIT) Volume 3 Issue 2, Mar - Apr 2017

RESEARCH ARTICLE
0 OPEN ACCESS

An Analysis of Urdu Optical Character Recogition Processing

Dr. V.Ajantha Devi [1], J. Ashifa [2]
Assistant Professor [1], Research Scholar [2]
Department of Computer Science
Sri Adi Chunchanagiri Womens College, Cumbum
Tamil Nadu -India.

ABSTRACT
This paper is about presenting presents a technique for recognition of Urdu words in Nastaliq font using ligatures as units of
recognition. In Nastalique, word and character overlapping makes optical recognition more complex. Optical character
recognition of the Latin script is relatively easier. This paper based on research on Nastalique OCR discusses a proposed finite
state model for the optical recognition of Nastalique printed text.
Keywords:- Pattern Recognition, Optical Character Recognition, Urdu Text, Ligatures.

I. INTRODUCTION

Urdu is spoken by 490 million people around the

world. It is the 4th largest language spoken and understood
in the world. It is the official language of Pakistan and five
Indian states. Urdu was developed under the great influence
of Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages almost 900 years
ago. Due to huge significance of Urdu script a number of
researchers have focused on Optical Character Recognition
systems, which can convert Urdu ancient literature to digital
format. Fig 1: Urdu Alphabet
The most difficult case in character segmentation is
the cursive script. The scripted nature of Arabic written Classification of Alphabet
language poses some high challenges for automatic In Urdu Alphabet, several characters are similar to
character segmentation and recognition. All these methods each other with respect to their basic shapes. They vary from
need pre-processing and normalization of the scanned word each other because of diacritics (dots) attached with them.
images before the features can be extracted. During this pre- Hence, can group the similar characters to minimize the
processing step as many individual characteristics as diversity. All 38 characters of Urdu alphabet can be
possible are removed, to make the feature extraction and classified into 21 classes. This classification is shown in
recognition as simple as possible. following figure 2

Alphabet
Urdu character set is comprised of 38 basic shapes.
It does not include Aerab (Diacritics used for
pronunciation and vowel sounds). This alphabet is shown in
figure 1.

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 International Journal of Information Technology (IJIT) Volume 3 Issue 2, Mar - Apr 2017
process step. The proposed UrduOCR algorithm follows the
following three main steps

Fig 4: Proposed Urdu OCR Algorithm

Step 1: Image acquisition

The proposed AOCR starts with image acquisition
. process (see Figure 5) that scans the Urdu text using a 300
dpi scanner, the scanned image is saved in a .bmp image
Fig 2: Classification of Urdu Alphabet
file.

II. GENERIC OCR MODULES

OCR systems proposed by different researchers are

comprised of various modules. Almost every one proposed a
pre-processing unit to clean the image and make it ready for
recognition process.

Fig 5: Original Image

Step 2: Image pre-processing

The image is filtered using a median filter that
removes noise, the image is converted from RGB to gray
scale image, and then it is converted to binary image. It
should be noted that not removing the noise may lead to
incorrect results in the recognition process. The area outside
text boundaries is removed using a clipping process and
finally, the binary image is resized to a common defined size
as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 3: Different phases of OCR

OCR consists of many phases such as Pre-processing,

Segmentation, Feature Extraction, Classifications and
Recognition. The input of one step is the output of next step.
The task of pre-processing relates to the removal of noise
and variation in text document. In this paper, the proposed
OCR algorithm combines the word segmentation, character
segmentation and recognition steps in a coherent template
Fig 6: Binary Clipped Image

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 International Journal of Information Technology (IJIT) Volume 3 Issue 2, Mar - Apr 2017
Step 3: Image recognition
This step equivalent to the mentioned line
segmentation, word segmentation, character segmentation
and recognition steps. (i) The binary image is segmented
into lines of text; Figure 7 shows the two lines of text that
are segmented from the binary image in Figure 6.
Second Line First Line
Figure 7: Line segmentation
Feature Extraction
In this phase, features of individual character are
extracted. The performance of an each character recognition
system that depends on the features that are extracted. The
extracted features from input character should allow
classification of a character in a unique way. We used
diagonal features, intersection and open end points features,
transition features, zoning features, directional features,
parabola curve fittingbased features, and power curve
fittingbased features in order to find the feature set for a
given character.
III. CONCLUSION
This paper tells about OCR system for online and
offline character recognition This study was next step for
segmentation based OCR for Noori Nastaleeq. The work one
has been a continuation of already proposed techniques with
refinements in different modules. Hence there is a need to
develop a very good character recognition system which
must achieve highest accuracy. The challenges are font
dependent. Hence, a detailed font study can help in finding
good solutions for these challenges.
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