Abstract: Handwriting analysis is an important research area in today’s world. In many languages, recognition of handwritten letters, numerals and words were focused by the researchers. To the best of our knowledge, there is no public domain database of Tamil Scripts available for handwriting analysis. Hence the idea of creating own database for Tamil Handwriting raised. This paper describes the efforts to create a collection of handwritten samples in Tamil to support research activities in offline Tamil handwriting analysis and recognition. The database is created with a view to make it available publicly for research purpose, which contains handwritten- scripts of 300 document images of different writers. The collected documents were converted into document images and then preprocessed. The paper concludes with the status of the effort and future directions.

Keywords: Handwriting samples, Document Images, Tamil Script, Preprocessing