Offline Script Identification from multilingual Indic-script documents: A state-of-the-art

Offline Script Identification (OSI) facilitates many important applications such as automatic archiving of multilingual documents, searching online/offline archives of document images and for the selection of script specific Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in a multilingual environment. In a multilingual country like India, a document containing text words in more than one language is a common scenario. A state-of-the-art survey about the techniques available in the area of OSI for Indic scripts would be of a great aid to the researchers. Hence, a sincere attempt is made in this article to discuss the advancements reported in the literature during the last few decades. Various feature extraction and classification techniques associated with the OSI of the Indic scripts are discussed in this survey. We hope that this survey will serve as a compendium not only for researchers in India, but also for policymakers and practitioners in India. It will also help to accomplish a target of bringing the researchers working on different Indic scripts together. Taking the recent developments in OSI of Indian regional scripts into consideration, this article will provide a better platform for future research activities.