A team of researcher at IIT-Madras developed a method for reading documents in Bharati Script by using a multi-lingual optical character recognition (OCR) scheme.

• Bharati is a unified script for nine Indian languages which is being proposed as a common script for India.
• The integrated script includes Devnagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil.
• Urdu and English were not integrated so far because of their very different phonetic organisation.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Schemes  involves separating/segmenting document into text and non-text. The text is then further divided into paragraphs, sentences words and letters. Each letter is recognized as character in some recognisable format like ASCII or Unicode.