Bengali OCR services
Scanned Bengali books, registers, court files and government records converted into accurate, searchable XML, EPUB or plain text — with a measured accuracy report for every batch.
Used in West Bengal, Tripura and southern Assam.
Figures from our 2002 electoral-roll project, run on Telugu and English scans.
Why Bengali OCR is harder than English
Generic OCR tools are built and benchmarked on Latin script. These are the specific things that break them on Bengali — and the things we had to solve to process 70,000 scanned PDFs into 10 lakh+ structured records.
Heavy conjunct usage
Bengali combines consonants freely, and the resulting shapes often look nothing like their parts — they must be learned as distinct classes.
Its own digits
Bengali numerals differ from Latin ones and appear mixed with them in official documents, so number fields need explicit handling.
Ya-phala and ref marks
Small attached strokes change pronunciation and meaning, and are the first thing lost to compression on a newspaper scan.
Colonial-era mixed printing
Nineteenth-century material sets Bengali and English on the same page in different type sizes and inks.
Bengali documents we handle
- Bengali literature and back-list books for EPUB
- Colonial administrative records
- Court records
- Academic journals
- Newspaper archives
Typically for National Library of India, Calcutta High Court, universities and College Street publishers.
How a Bengali batch runs
- 1Ingest
Bulk PDF intake from any source — scans, photos, government portals. Page splitting, de-skew, de-noise.
- 2OCR in the right script
Models for Devanagari, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Odia, Urdu and Latin scripts, tuned on Indian government and publishing layouts: tables, multi-column, mixed scripts.
- 3Structure to XML
Fields, tables and hierarchy mapped to your schema — JATS, TEI, DocBook, ONIX, or a custom XSD. Validated on every file.
- 4Quality checks
Automated confidence scoring plus human review of low-confidence pages. You get an accuracy report, not a promise.
- 5Deliver & search
XML/EPUB/JSON/CSV delivery, or a ready-made search interface like the one we built for 2002 voter rolls.
Bengali OCR questions
- How accurate is Bengali OCR?
- It depends far more on scan quality than on the language. On clean modern print we reach high accuracy; on twenty-year-old photocopies the honest answer is that some pages need human review. We run a free 50-page sample of your own documents first and send you the measured accuracy before you commit to anything.
- Can you read handwritten Bengali?
- Handwriting is a separate and harder problem than print, and results vary with the hand. We assess it on your sample and tell you plainly whether it is viable, rather than promising and disappointing you later.
- What formats do I get back?
- Validated XML in your schema, EPUB 3, JSON, CSV or plain Unicode text — plus an accuracy report per batch. You own all output.
- Do you keep the table and page structure?
- Yes. For records like registers and land documents the structure matters as much as the text, so we map fields, rows and columns into your schema rather than dumping a wall of characters.
- Is my Bengali data sent outside India?
- No. Processing runs on our own Python pipeline on servers in India, and we do not upload your documents to third-party AI services without your written agreement.
Send 50 Bengali pages, free
You get back XML or text plus a measured accuracy report within a week. Then you decide.