Udupi: Ancient stone inscriptions or epigraphs are important sources of information for historians, since they give an insight about the history, culture, socio-economic status, administration and literature of olden civilizations. Without proper digital preservation of stone inscriptions, our future generations may never get to know about the rich cultural heritage of the country. So, efforts are being put worldwide for proper digitization of ancient stone inscriptions and palm leaf manuscripts.

In this direction, the students of final year Electronics & Communication Engineering at Shri Madhwa Vadiraja Institute of Technology, Bantakal, have developed a unique system for optical character recognition and period prediction of ancient Kannada epigraphs using digital image processing techniques. Taking the images of ancient Kannada epigraphs as input, this system converts it into a document file of characters in the current Kannada script.

It is also possible to predict the era of the inscription belonging to different periods, from Brahmi to Chalukya. The system was developed by the students Sridevi, Sowjanya, Shrikari Bhagawat and Sameeksha Acharya, with the guidance of Assistant Professor Mr. Sachin Bhat.