JSE_V4_N2_RP4 R. Jagadeesh Kannan R. Prabhakar Journal on Software Engineering 2230 – 7168 4 2 33 46 Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Printed Text, Handwriting Recognition, Cursive Text, Off-line Character Recognition, On-line Character Recognition, Tamil Script In the field of pattern recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been a cutting edge research area for the last few decades. And for quite some time now, the recognition of Indian language characters has been a subject of attention. A number of approaches have been proposed by researchers for recognizing printed, handwritten and cursive Tamil scripts both off-line and on-line. This article presents a survey of the researches available for optical character recognition of Tamil characters, an Indian language, along with a comparative study of our approaches against the most significant approaches from the literature. In addition, a concise description about the OCR system and the Tamil Script is provided. The aim of this article is to assist the budding researchers in the field of Tamil Optical Character Recognition in understanding the available methods and to aid their research further. October - December 2009 Copyright © 2009 i-manager publications. All rights reserved. i-manager Publications http://www.imanagerpublications.com/Article.aspx?ArticleId=1070