Creation of original Tamil character dataset through segregation of ancient palm leaf manuscripts in medicine

Palm leaves were one of the essential and primary sources for writing before the advent of paper. Tamil is one of the oldest southern Indian languages and among the ten oldest languages of the world. Agathiyar, a renowned Siddhar of ancient India, considered as the Father of Siddha Medicine, wrote all his therapeutic procedures only on palm leaf manuscripts, in the Tamil language. For modern day, people who try to only write and read new aspects of Tamil, identifying the ancient characters of the language is difficult. To expand readability and secure the written medicinal practices and traditions, a better recognition system is needed that can transform the ancient text images to modern ones, interpreting the ancient Tamil characters from palm leaves and understanding their contexts a time‐consuming and complicated process. Especially when it comes to medicine, the practitioners need to understand the contents of a manuscript, to apply them on a daily basis. Therefore, a recognition system is of much use to understand, interpret, and apply the techniques explained in the manuscript on a daily basis. This study is an attempt to create a considerable volume of Tamil character datasets through the segregation of ancient Tamil palm leaf manuscripts related to the field of medicine. In this study, the characters created are fed as inputs to expert systems for intelligent recognition of the context and content perceived to be present in the selected medical manuscripts. The characters have been identified in large numbers manually, and datasets are created using Gaussian distortion.