A Low Resource Multi-lingual Simultaneous Script Identification and Text Recognition Model

In this paper, we have proposed a multi-task learning model for multi-lingual Optical Character Recognition. Our model does the script identification and text recognition simultaneously of offline machine printed documents. We have extracted the spatial and temporal features of a line image by the combination of several CNN and BLSTM layers. The feature is shared between the script identification and text recognition modules. Fully connected layer and softmax identify the script. The identified script works as a case selector for the text recognizer which is a CTC layer. Finally, the text is identified by the text recognizer. The model is applied to two public datasets: ISIDDI, RETAS containing Bengali degraded, and English pages. We have created a dataset of Devnagari/Hindi and Tamil scripts to test our model. The model has achieved 99.2% accuracy for script recognition. The achieved text recognition accuracy on the scripts Bengali, English, Hindi, and Tamil are respectively 91.68%, 97.07%, 95.68% and 92.27%.