Dr.R.S.SABEENIAN, Professor/ECE & Centre Head Sona SIPRO has received “AICTE Career Award for Young Teacher (CAYT)”for carrying out the project 'Development of Digital Encoding System for Tamil Characters in Palm Leaf Manuscripts' from 2015-18.
Prof M.E.Paramasivam and Prof P.M.Dinesh are two doctoral candidates working under Dr.R.S.Sabeenian carrying out their Ph.D in the above mentioned topic.
Objective of the Project:
A lot of effort is taken up by the Government of India to preserve palm manuscripts under the project ‘National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM)’. However, ‘Apparent Reading’ of these manuscripts itself requires three months of training from experts. Experts who have learnt to read these manuscripts take up the task of reading only if required by an ‘Intended Reader’ for his scholarly work. Also the time taken for manual apparent reading is much more due to multi-facet reasons. Hence most of the manuscripts lay in the repositories still unused. This proposed system would help an apparent reader to quickly decode the text written on the palm leaf in a printed form with the help of a computer and necessary software systems. The developed system can then be extended to other languages for decoding the information from the manuscripts. Later on a digital server can be developed for storing the encoded palm leaf manuscripts information. This can be utilized by the ‘Intended Reader’ as and when required, without the help of the ‘Apparent Reader’.
A computer based printed reproduction of classical Tamil text from palm leaf manuscripts is proposed based on image processing techniques. Image processing techniques such as statistical and transform based approach can be used on the monochrome images of palm leaves for classifying different characters present on the palm leaves. The developed semi-automatic system would be capable of retrieving handwritten text into printable text.
Website : www.sonasipro.in