What is it about?
The paper gives the complete design details involved in the development of Lipi Gnani, a printed text recognition software that can work on any document of Kannada, Sanskrit, Tulu and Konkani, printed in Kannada script. This paper is a benchmark for Kannada document recognition and has been recommended by a reviewer for the best paper award. This OCR has now been licensed to RaGaVeRa Indic Technologies by the Indian Institute of Science. Another startup, BhaShiNi Digitization Services, is using Lipi Gnani to digitize hundreds of Kannada books by famous authors into e-books that can be read on Amazon Kindle, etc. This startup has been funded for this work by the Karnataka Startup Cell. And they are successfully running the OCR on Raspberry Pi processor !
Featured Image
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Printed text recognition software can be used to convert physical libraries with huge collection of printed text into digital libraries accessible from anywhere in the world. Lipi Gnani is the best of the OCRs for all Indian languages. It is 3 times as fast and marginally better than Google's Tesseract OCR version 4.0.0
Perspectives
Today, everyone talks about deep neural networks and end-to-end systems. This is a data and computation hungry approach, and hence, it not easily scalable to new problems. However, our approach is based on support vector machines and we have made use of a lot of domain-knowledge to create a printed text recognition system for Kannada, whose computational requirement is less for the user and very less for the developer.
Ramakrishnan Angarai Ganesan
Indian Institute of Science
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Lipi Gnani, ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, July 2020, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3387632.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Enabling the blind to access printed content
It is a video taken by Live Mint in connection with the Manthan Award received by Prof. A G Ramakrishnan and Dr. Shiva Kumar H R for their project, "Gift of New Abilities". The OCR technology developed by Ramakrishnan, Shiva Kumar and their team has been used to convert more than 500 Tamil books into Braille books. The Kannada OCR is now being used to convert Kannada books into e-books by a startup, BhaShiNi Digitization Services.
Manthan Awards | Interview of Prof. A G Ramakrishnan
Twenty-six social entrepreneurs from South Asia and Asia-Pacific were given the Manthan awards in Dec. 2014 for their efforts in improving the lives of people using digital technologies. Mint interviewed some of the winners. This is the interview of Prof. A G Ramakrishnan.
Presentation at India Habitat Centre and Q&A by Manthan Panel
Presentation by A G Ramakrishnan and Shiva Kumar H Ron the work done by MILE Lab in digitizing books for the blind - at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi as finalists of Manthan Award and the following question & answer session with the panel and also the audience.
Article by Live Mint
Coverage by the online newspaper, Live Mint, of the project by MILE Lab, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Braille tool by IISc scientist wins award
Coverage by the newspaper, Deccan Herald, when Shiva Kumar H R received the Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Award, 2015. He was guided by Prof A G Ramakrishnan.
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