Understanding the ancient script can provide rich details of a civilization, like its cultural, political and social scenarios. Brahmi, an ancient mother script, has been a key to the development of many modern Indian scripts like Gurmukhi, Devanagari, Bangla etc. Inferring ancient writings can be a tedious job and moreover, if executed manually, it requires several language experts. The current paper presents a recognition system for Brahmi characters using linear Support Vector machine classifier. Gradient information of the character images pixels is extracted, and histogram of the gradients is stored as a feature vector for each character image. Character dataset includes both handwritten character images and images from the internet. Linear SVM classifier is trained on the feature set of 24 images of each character. The proposed recognition system is performed with an accuracy of 91.6% to recognize the Brahmi characters from the test images.

Analysis and recognition of ancient scripts is a challenging task as these scripts are inscribed on pillars, stones, or leaves. Optical recognition systems can help in preserving, sharing, and accelerate the study of the ancient scripts, but lack of standard dataset for such scripts is a major constraint. Although many scholars and researchers have captured and uploaded inscription images on various websites, manual searching, downloading and extraction of these images is tedious and error prone. Web search queries return a vast number of irrelevant results, and manually extracting images for a specific script is not scalable. This paper proposes a novel multistage system to identify the specific set of script images from a large set of images downloaded from web sources. The proposed system combines the two most important pattern matching techniques-Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Template matching, in a sequential pipeline, and by using the key strengths of each technique, the system can discard irrelevant images while retaining a specific type of images.