Kannada OCR services
Scanned Kannada 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 Karnataka — around 5 crore speakers.
Figures from our 2002 electoral-roll project, run on Telugu and English scans.
Why Kannada OCR is harder than English
Generic OCR tools are built and benchmarked on Latin script. These are the specific things that break them on Kannada — and the things we had to solve to process 70,000 scanned PDFs into 10 lakh+ structured records.
Ottakshara stack below the line
Secondary consonants sit beneath the base letter, so a text line has content below its own baseline and naive line-cutting slices words in half.
Rounded forms that resemble each other
Kannada shares its rounded family of shapes with Telugu; distinguishing letters on a degraded scan depends on very small features.
Land record layouts
RTC and Pahani documents are dense tables with printed and handwritten fields mixed. Reading the text is only half the job — the table structure has to survive too.
Kannada and English in one field
Names, survey numbers and codes are frequently bilingual inside the same cell.
Kannada documents we handle
- RTC and Pahani land records
- Court judgments
- Kannada literature and periodicals
- University and examination records
- Municipal and revenue files
Typically for Karnataka State Archives, High Court, universities and Kannada publishers.
How a Kannada 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.
Kannada OCR questions
- How accurate is Kannada 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 Kannada?
- 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 Kannada 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 Kannada pages, free
You get back XML or text plus a measured accuracy report within a week. Then you decide.