Script Separation in Machine Printed Bilingual (Devnagari and Gurumukhi) Documents Using Morphological Approach

In this paper, a bilingual script recognition system is developed to identify and separate out texts written in Devnagari and Gurumukhi scripts. It is observed that vertical half strokes and horizontal strokes are predominantly used in Gurumukhi script compared to Devnagari. On the basis of this observation, we develop a morphological image processing based scheme to extract vertical and horizontal strokes in a document image. The two script regions are subsequently separated out on the basis of the density of these strokes in different regions of the document. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. However, the proposed scheme works well only with machine printed documents.