An Overview of Character Recognition from Palm Leaf Manuscripts

Palm leaf manuscripts are the first form of writing materials and are the special repositories of information from several ages that have enlightened humanity on a variety of themes, including medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and astrology. Due to the lack of proper preservation techniques, these manuscripts are disappearing at an alarm rate. This necessitates the digitization of these manuscripts. In this paper, initially the major steps in digitization process are presented. Then, an intensive review is conducted on the available work in every step of digitizing Palm leaf manuscript. This study also analyzes the accuracy, efficiency, and superiority of each method and identifies the best method currently available for each step in the automatic palm leaf manuscript digitization process.