3 days ago
IIT Roorkee develops world's first AI tool to decode Modi script into Devanagari
In a major push for India's digital heritage mission, IIT Roorkee has created the world's first AI model that transliterates the ancient Modi script into Devanagari. The tool, called MoScNet, helps convert old handwritten manuscripts into readable text, making them accessible for research, education, and project, named Historic Scripts to Modern Vision, also includes a one-of-a-kind dataset -- MoDeTrans -- that has over 2,000 images of original Modi script manuscripts. These cover eras from Shivaji's time to the British period and come with verified Devanagari India, there are more than 40 million records in Modi script, from land deeds and Ayurveda texts to medieval science. With very few experts who can read the script, this AI model fills a massive research and preservation DOES THE TOOL WORK?
MoScNet uses a Vision-Language Model (VLM) architecture and performs far better than existing OCR tools. It's light, scalable, and ideal for use even in low-infrastructure regions where these manuscripts are found.
The AI tool was developed under Prof. Sparsh Mittal at IIT Roorkee, with help from students Harshal and Tanvi (COEP Pune) and Onkar (Vishwakarma Institute). Their work brought the model to life and shaped its real-world BHARATGPT, BHASHINI, AND GLOBAL HERITAGE EFFORTSThe model fits into big national missions like Digital India, BharatGPT, Bhashini, and even aligns with UN SDG Goal 11.4, which focuses on protecting cultural heritage. It could also be adapted globally for endangered the MoScNet model and the MoDeTrans dataset are now open-sourced on Hugging Face, allowing researchers worldwide to build on this innovation.- Ends
