A New Research Resource for Optical Recognition of Embossed and Hand Punched Hindi Devanagari Braille Characters Bharati Braille Bank
To develop a Braille recognition system, it is required to have the stored images of Braille sheets. This paper describes a method and also the challenges of building the corpora for Hindi Devanagari Braille. A few Braille databases and commercial software's are obtainable for English and Arabic Braille languages, but none for Indian Braille which is popularly known as Bharathi Braille. However, the size and scope of the English and Arabic Braille language databases are limited. Researchers frequently develop and self evaluate their algorithm based on the same private data set and report its behavior using ad hoc measures of performance. There is no well defined benchmark database for comparative performance evaluation of results obtained. The developed Braille database, Bharati Braille Bank, is a large and well characterized information of Braille documents and its related data for use by the research community working in Optical Braille Recognition (OBR) for Bharati Braille. In the present form it includes databases of embossed double sided, embossed single sided, skewed, Hand punched and images with varying resolutions of Hindi Braille. The objective of this work is to stimulate current research and new investigations in the study of Hindi OBR. Without common databases such as those provided by Braille Bank it is impossible to resolve certain contradictory research results. To overcome this problem, Braille Bank provides facilities for the comparative analysis of the data and the evaluation of proposed algorithms with the standard database. In addition, it provides free access to the developed database in the form of Compact Disc Read Only Memory (CD ROM) This work is a step forward in the direction of development of standards for Hindi Devanagari Braille data collection for Indian languages. The mission of the resource is to accelerate the development of OBR for Bharati Braille.