Identification of Tamil ancient characters and information retrieval from temple epigraphy using image zoning

The aim of this paper is to develop a system that involves character recognition and information retrieval of Brahmi, Vattezhuthu and Grantha letters from temple epigraphy and their conversion to the present Tamil digital text format. Though many researchers have implemented various algorithms and techniques for character recognition in different languages, Ancient letter conversion still poses a big challenge. Because Image recognition technology has reached near-perfection when it comes to scanning English and other language text. But optical character recognition (OCR) software capable of digitizing printed Tamil text with high levels of accuracy is still elusive. Only a few people are familiar with the ancient characters and make attempts to convert them into written documents manually. If this continues, all the precious information given by our forefathers will not be known to the future generations. The proposed system overcomes such a situation by converting all the ancient characters from inscriptions and palm manuscripts into Tamil digital text format. After converting into the Tamil digital text, the words will not be correct spelling. Because the ancient words are Etymological word, the meaning is not known. So this modal approach is to solve these types of problem and convert the Tamil digital text with meaning.