Hierarchical OCR for printed Tamil text

Aarif Noordeen, Kawshik Kannan, Harish Ravi, Bhaskar Venkatraman, R. S. Milton

Abstract: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of Tamil characters is harder, due to the variety, compared to that of Latin characters. We propose a new technique to perform optical character recognition of printed Tamil characters using a hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) which recognises the similarities between characters, while identifying the differences between the fine-grained characters. The performance of the developed system is comparable to the stateof-the-art techniques for OCR.