International Journal on Future Revolution in Computer Science & Communication Engineering ISSN: 2454-4248 Volume: 3 Issue: 7 18 – 22 _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 18 IJFRCSCE | July 2017, Available @ http://www.ijfrcsce.org _______________________________________________________________________________________ Opportunities and Challenges of Handwritten Sanskrit Character Recognition System Shailendra Kumar Singh Research Scholar, CSE Department SLIET Longowal, Sangrur, Punjab, India Sks.it2012@gmail.com Manoj Kumar Sachan Assosiate Professor, CSE Department SLIET Longowal, Sangrur, Punjab, India manojsachan@gmail.com Abstract: The rapid growth in the field of internet facilities and digitalization, changes the living way of human being. Due to internet facilities and services, anyone can access data from anywhere. A lot of online data are generating day by day, so that data needs to be processed before extracting the information. Therefore the demand of Natural language Processing (NLP) Techniques has been increased. The Pattern recognition is sub-field of NLP. The field of Pattern Recognition is a branch of machine learning that contributed up to great extent in the Computer Vision and Machine Vision applications. Pattern Recognition is concerned with the recognition of patterns and regularities in data. Handwriting recognition is one of the challenging subtask and current research field under Pattern Recognition, due to different ways of writing and handwriting styles. Handwritten Sanskrit Characters recognition is more complicated than other languages works in online and offline mode, because Sanskrit characters have more consonants and modifiers. In this paper discussed the opportunities and challenges of Handwritten Sanskrit Character Recognition System. Keywords: Pattern Recognition, Devanagari, Sanskrit, Sanskrit Character, Character Recognition System, Handwriting. __________________________________________________*****_________________________________________________ I. INTRODUCTION With the development of new technologies, demand of digital content increases day by day. There are a lot of handwritten contents are stored in libraries, but they are not accessible from outside the libraries. So, there is need of content digitalization for converting handwritten contents into editable and digital form to avail the content online. To generate the digital content, need for the development of an online or offline Handwriting Recognition System with high performance has become essential. Handwriting is a personal skill of every individual. Each person has their own unique style of handwriting; it may be everyday handwriting or their personal signature. Now time is to use the digital signature. The characteristics of handwriting are [17]: slop, specific shape, thickness, average size of letters, pressure to the paper and regular or irregular spacing between letters. These characteristic are used to recognize the handwritten characters. The Handwriting Recognition System (HRS) is used to take handwritten document (texts) as input and produce editable document (digital text) as an output as shown in fig. 1. There are two types of HRS i.e offline and online HRS as discussed in section II. Figure:1 Handwriting Recognition System Devanagari is an ancient Indian script that is used to write languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and several others. Sanskrit language is written in Devanagari Script. Sanskrit is an ancient Indo Aryan language. In India the state of Uttarakhand has ruled Sanskrit as its second official language [16]. It is also one of official language in India. Most of the Indian Languages have influenced of vocabulary and grammatical base of Sanskrit language. There is a horizontal line at the top of each character or word in Sanskrit language as shown in fig.2. This horizontal line is called as Shirorekha [1]. Sanskrit consists of 48 characters (15 vowels and 33 consonants) as shown in fig.3. Figure:2 Shows Shirorekha and Zones (a)Vowels (b) Consonants Figure:3 Sanskrit alphabet in modern Devanagari Script; (a) Vowels and (b) Consonants The NLP techniques are used in HRS. There are a large number of works done using the NLP techniques such as Sentiment analysis [2, 3], Script recognition [4, 5], information extraction etc. The main aim of Handwriting recognition is to INPUT Processing मेरा भारत महान है OUTPUT