A novel 3D approach to recognize Telugu palm leaf text

Abstract Ancient wisdom and heritage of Southeast Asian countries were preserved in thousands of palm leaf manuscripts. Due to various factors like aging, insect bites, stains, etc., they are easily susceptible to deterioration. Hence preserving and digitizing such fragile documents is highly essential. Traditional scanning or camera-capturing of such documents suffer from multiple noise artifacts. A depth sensing approach is proposed to eliminate background noise for such manuscripts. The segmented characters extracted from Telugu palm scripts are further recognized using statistical approaches. The improved recognition accuracy is reported using the 3D feature (depth).