Novel SVD Based Character Recognition Approach for Malayalam Language Script

The research on character recognition for Malayalam script dates back to 1990’s. Compared to other Indian languages the research and developments on OCR reported for Malayalam script is very less. The character level and word level accuracy of the existing OCR tools for Indian languages can be improved by implementing robust character recognition and post-processing algorithms. In this paper, we are proposing a character recognition procedure based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and k- Nearest Neighbor classifier (k-NN). The proposed character recognition scheme tested with the dataset created from Malayalam literature books and it could classify 94% of character images accurately.