Character Segmentation Scheme for OCR System: For Myanmar Printed Documents

2. Nature Of Myanmar Script

In Myanmar script, there is no distinction between upper case and lower case characters. The direction of writing is from left to right in horizontally. The character set consists of 35 consonants (including ‘ဉ’ and ‘ႆ’), 8 vowels signs, 7 independent vowels, 5 combining marks, 6 symbols and punctuations, and 10 digits. Each word can be formed by combining consonants, vowels and various signs. It has its own specified composition rules for combining vowels, consonants and modifiers. There are total of above 1881glyphs and has many similarity scripts in this language (e.g., ယ, ဃ and so on). When writing text, space is used after each phrase instead of each word or syllable. The shapes of Myanmar scripts are circular, consist of straight lines horizontally or vertically or slantways, and dots (Hussain, Durrani, & Gul, 2005; Maw, 2001; Alexander, 2003).