Enhanced hybrid technique for efficient digitization of handwritten marksheets

Abstract

The digitization of handwritten marksheets presents huge challenges due to the different styles of handwriting and complex table structures in such documents like marksheets. This work introduces a hybrid method that integrates OpenCV for table detection and PaddleOCR for recognizing sequential handwritten text. The image processing capabilities of OpenCV efficiently detects rows and columns which enable computationally lightweight and accurate table detection. Additionally, YOLOv8 and Modified YOLOv8 are implemented for handwritten text recognition within the detected table structures alongside Paddle OCR which further enhance the sys tem's versatility: The proposed model achieves high accuracy on our custom dataset which is designed to represent different and diverse handwriting styles and complex table layouts. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLOv8 Modified achieves an accuracy of 92.72%, outperforming PaddleOCR 91.37% and the YOLOV8 model 88.91% This efficiency reduces the necessity for manual work which makes this a practical and fast solution for digitizing academic as well as administrative documents. This research serves the field of document automation, particularly hand-written document understanding, by providing operational and reliable methods to scale, enhance, and integrate the technologies involved.