Ancient tamil digits recognition using convolutional neural network.

People in Tamil Nadu have been more interested in history during the past years. When people see the old script inscribed on stone walls, potteries, copper plates, and Palm Manuscripts, history is more intriguing. But people have to learn old scripts in order to read these inscriptions, so not many people are capable of reading them. A ground breaking effort that educates the public about these ancient scripts and eventually sparks their interest in history is the use of deep learning algorithms for script recognition. Recognizing ancient Tamil characters is a difficult challenge for epigraphers because the language has evolved over the previous three thousand years with distinct characters set. Though there have been a few studies published on the recognition of ancient Tamil alphabets, there have been no papers on the recognition of ancient Tamil numbers. This project's main objective is to use convolution neural network (CNN) to recognize Tamil digits used between 9th to 12th century in Tamil inscriptions. In this paper work, the inscription photographs acquired from various Tamil temples are pre-processed. The color photographs were cropped, converted to grayscale and then to binary images during the pre-processing process. These pre-processed images are used as training and validation datasets for the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]