Word Spotting for Indic Documents to Facilitate Retrieval

Abstract

With advances in the field of digitization of printed documents and several mass digitization projects underway, information retrieval and document search have emerged as key research areas. However, most of the current work in these areas is limited to English and a few oriental languages. The lack of efficient solutions for Indic scripts has hampered information extraction from a large body of documents of cultural and historical importance. This chapter presents two relevant topics in this area. First, we describe the use of a script-specific keyword spotting for Devanagari documents that makes use of domain knowledge of the script. Second, we address the needs of a digital library to provide access to a collection of documents from multiple scripts. This requires intelligent solutions which scale across different scripts. We present a script-independent keyword spotting approach for this purpose. Experimental results illustrate the efficacy of our methods.