Role of Context in Devanagari Script Recognition

Context plays a dominant role in final interpretation of Devanagari text. This is especially true for hand written texts. The upper and lower modifier symbols are rarely recognised correctly due to their incorrct placement, intermingling and/or incorrect segmentation. A Devanagari text recogniser has to associate these modifier symbols with the appropriate characters from the core strip to arrive at a “syntactically” meaningful word by making appropriate substitutions wherever required. This paper presents methodology and results for Devanagari text recognition using script composition contextual information for post-processing the recognised symbols.