Malayalam OCR services
Scanned Malayalam 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 Kerala and Lakshadweep, plus a large Gulf diaspora.
Figures from our 2002 electoral-roll project, run on Telugu and English scans.
Why Malayalam OCR is harder than English
Generic OCR tools are built and benchmarked on Latin script. These are the specific things that break them on Malayalam — and the things we had to solve to process 70,000 scanned PDFs into 10 lakh+ structured records.
Old lipi versus new lipi
The 1971 script reform simplified many conjuncts. Books printed before it use forms that later fonts do not contain, and a library's back-list spans both. This single issue breaks most off-the-shelf Malayalam OCR.
A very large conjunct inventory
Malayalam has more distinct ligature shapes than most Indian scripts, so the classifier has far more classes to separate.
Chillu letters
Pure consonants have their own forms, and their Unicode representation changed between standards — output has to be normalised or search will fail later.
Dense typesetting
Malayalam books are set tightly, so adjacent lines touch on a slightly skewed scan.
Malayalam documents we handle
- Malayalam books and magazines for EPUB
- Church and parish registers
- Court records
- Land and revenue documents
- Academic and literary archives
Typically for Kerala State Archives, High Court, CUSAT and Malayalam publishers such as the Kottayam and Kozhikode houses.
How a Malayalam 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.
Malayalam OCR questions
- How accurate is Malayalam 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 Malayalam?
- 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 Malayalam 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 Malayalam pages, free
You get back XML or text plus a measured accuracy report within a week. Then you decide.