Recognition of printed Devanagari text using BLSTM Neural Network

In this paper, we propose a recognition scheme for the Indian script of Devanagari. Recognition accuracy of Devanagari script is not yet comparable to its Roman counterparts. This is mainly due to the complexity of the script, writing style etc. Our solution uses a Recurrent Neural Network known as Bidirectional LongShort Term Memory (BLSTM). Our approach does not require word to character segmentation, which is one of the most common reason for high word error rate. We report a reduction of more than 20% in word error rate and over 9% reduction in character error rate while comparing with the best available OCR system.