Students develop software to decipher shorthand text to English

Panaji: Pretty soon, the incomprehensible prescription notes written by doctors may make sense to you, thanks to a new system developed by the students of Don Bosco Engineering College which deciphers stenographic shorthand text into readable English.
Joshua Salema, Vaishnavi Kamat Dhakankar, Akeel Phaldessai, Aqsa Nadaf and Pranoy Paes, all final year computer engineering students, have developed the Intelligent Stenographic Text Recognition System.Currently, there are no applications designed to recognize shorthand symbols. There are, however, applications to recognize Chinese symbols and other languages.
The new software will analyze the shorthand text as an image, and will then translate it into English words that correspond to the meaning of the text.
“We have taken a page of shorthand text as our input is in the form of an image. To recognize the symbols, we first segment each line from the image. Then we segment each symbol from each line and get individual images for each shorthand symbol. Each symbol is then recognized using a process called ‘template matching’ after which English text is generated. We plan to develop our own encryption algorithm and incorporate it in an Android application,” Joshua Salema explained.
The team will shortly be applying for a patent for their innovation. According to assistant professor, Merwyn D’Souza, who was the project guide and helped the students develop the algorithm for the software, “The technology can be used for far various purposes other than helping in deciphering doctor’s prescription notes.”
“The software is one of the very few systems available today for decrypting shorthand symbols. It can be used by the security apparatus to communicate in encrypted language, and can also be used in courtrooms where a lot of shorthand is used. We have designed this software to even translate Konkani text written in Romi and Devanagari script to English,” D’Souza said.