基于汉字连通分量的印刷图像版面分割方法

针对彩色印刷图像背景色彩丰富和汉字存在多个连通分量,连通域文字分割算法不能精确提取文字,提出基于汉字连通分量的彩色印刷图像版面分割方法。利用金字塔变换逆半调算法对图像进行预处理,通过颜色采样和均值偏移分割图像颜色,标记文字连通分量,根据汉字结构和连通分量特性重建汉字连通分量,分析文字连通分量连接关系确定文字排列方向实现文字分割。实验结果表明,该方法能够有效地重建汉字连通分量,在彩色印刷图像中实现对不同字体、字号、颜色的文字分割。     

复杂彩色文本图像中字符的提取

从复杂彩色文本图像中提取和识别字符已经成为一个既困难又有趣的问题。本文给出了一个具有创新性和实用性的区域生长算法用于彩色图像的分割:彩色图像游程邻接算法CRAG(color run-length adjacency graph algorithm)。我们将该算法用于彩色文本图像,首先得到图像的彩色连通域,再对这些连通域的平均颜色进行颜色聚类,可得到若干个聚类中心,然后根据不同的颜色中心将图像分为相应的彩色层面,最后通过连通域分析判断所需的文字层。该生长算法修改并扩展了传统的BAG算法,并将其运用于彩色印刷体文本图像中,充分利用了彩色图像的颜色和位置信息。实验结果表明新的方法能很好的从彩色印刷图像中提取多种常见的艺术字,并具有较高的提取速度,同时保留了文字和背景图像的原始色彩,便于将来的图像恢复。     

一种基于文本检测的书脊定位方法

书脊定位是实现图书管理自动化的重要技术,通过对定位分割出的书脊图像进行图像匹配或文本识别获得图书信息,可大大减小图书检索、整理的人力劳动。论文提出了一种基于文本检测的书脊区域粗选方法,首先通过序贯分割算法检测图像中的字符整体区域,然后根据字符宽度和距离将同属于一本书的字符加入相似字符集合,根据集合内的字符中心和字符宽度计算候选书脊区域,最后通过支持向量机分类器精选书脊区域。相比于已有的书脊定位方法,论文算法在光照敏感、相邻书脊颜色对比度敏感、书脊多角度倾斜检测等方面进行了改善,在实验中取得了较好的定位成功率。     

A word extraction algorithm for machine-printed documents using a 3D neighborhood graph model

Automatic character recognition and image understanding of a given paper document are the main objectives of the computer vision field. For these problems, a basic step is to isolate characters and group words from these isolated characters. In this paper, we propose a new method for extracting characters from a mixed text/graphic machine-printed document and an algorithm for distinguishing words from the isolated characters. For extracting characters, we exploit several features (size, elongation, and density) of characters and propose a characteristic value for classification using the run-length frequency of the image component. In the context of word grouping, previous works have largely been concerned with words which are placed on a horizontal or vertical line. Our word grouping algorithm can group words which are on inclined lines, intersecting lines, and even curved lines. To do this, we introduce the 3D neighborhood graph model which is very useful and efficient for character classification and word grouping. In the 3D neighborhood graph model, each connected component of a text image segment is mapped onto 3D space according to the area of the bounding box and positional information from the document. We conducted tests with more than 20 English documents and more than ten oriental documents scanned from books, brochures, and magazines. Experimental results show that more than 95% of words are successfully extracted from general documents, even in very complicated oriental documents. Received August 3, 2001 / Accepted August 8, 2001     

电视图象中目标检索方法

本文给出一种有效的图象目标检索方法。该方法由颜色分割和定位算法组成。颜色分割中利用样本学习和非样本交互操作，提取目标的特征颜色，并以此建立颜色索引表，以提高颜色分割速度。这位算法中利用映射技术与区域相结合的操作确定目标的大小和位置。实验结果表明，本检索算法具有正确检测和定位目标的能力。     

Address block location on envelopes using Gabor filters

The large volume of mail and the increased cost of handling it has made postal automation an important domain for pattern recognition and computer vision research. A substantial amount of work is being done to design an automatic mail sorting system which can read and interpret the destination address on a mail piece and direct it to the appropriate bin. Robust optical character recognition (OCR) systems are now available which can read printed characters with great accuracy (> 99%). But, in order to read the destination address, the region in the image containing the address must first be located. Even though several approaches to address block location have been proposed in the literature, it remains a difficult problem. A simple method is presented for automatically identifying regions in envelope images which are candidates for being the destination address. The envelope image is considered to contain different textured regions, one of which corresponds to the text-content in the image. Thus, a texture-based segmentation method is used to identify the regions of text in the image. The method for texture discrimination is based on Gabor filters which have been successfully used earlier for a variety of texture classification and segmentation tasks. It is shown that only a small number of even-symmetric Gabor filters are needed in this application. The success of the texture-based segmentation algorithm for identifying address blocks is demonstrated on a number of test images. These results also demonstrate the invariance of the method to the orientation of text in the envelope image and the variations in the size and font of the text.     

An automated vision system for container-code recognition

Automatic container-code recognition is of great importance to the modern container management system. Similar techniques have been proposed for vehicle license plate recognition in past decades. Compared with license plate recognition, automatic container-code recognition faces more challenges due to the severity of nonuniform illumination and invalidation of color information. In this paper, a computer vision based container-code recognition technique is proposed. The system consists of three function modules, namely location, isolation, and character recognition. In location module, we propose a text-line region location algorithm, which takes into account the characteristics of single character as well as the spatial relationship between successive characters. This module locates the text-line regions by using a horizontal high-pass filter and scanline analysis. To resolve nonuniform illumination, a two-step procedure is applied to segment container-code characters, and a projection process is adopted to isolate characters in the isolation module. In character recognition module, the character recognition is achieved by classifying the extracted features, which represent the character image, with trained support vector machines (SVMs). The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed technique for practical usage.     

基于灰度图像的车牌字符提取算法研究

本文提出了一种基于灰度图像的车牌字符提取算法,该算法利用Canny算子提取车牌灰度图像中的字符。车牌字符提取后,采用迭代分割法求出最佳阈值对图像进行阈值化处理,结合形态学方法填充字符中的空隙。在VisualC＋＋6.0编程环境下进行了算法实现,实验结果表明,与传统的字符提取算法相比,该算法不仅具有较强的字符提取能力,明显降低噪声对检测结果的影响,而且字符边缘的连接较好,为后期车牌字符的识别提供了技术基础。     

Analysis of Mixed Korean Documents Using the Branch and Bound Algorithm Based on DP Matching

This paper presents an effective automated analysis system for mixed documents consisting of handwritten texts and graphic images. In the preprocessing step, an input image is binarized, then graphic regions are separated from text parts using chain codes of connected components. In the character recognition step, we recognize two different sets of handwritten characters: Korean and alphanumeric characters. Considering the structural complexity and variations of Korean characters, we separate them based on partial recognition results of vowels and extract primitive phonemes using a branch and bound algorithm based on dynamic programming (DP) matching. Finally, to validate recognition results, a dictionary and knowledge are employed. Computer simulation with 50 test documents shows that the proposed algorithm analyzes effectively mixed documents.     

边缘与灰度检测相结合的场景图像文本定位

自然场景图像中包含大量的图像和文本信息,其文本字符能够提供重要的语义信息。利用计算机自动检测并识别自然场景中的文本信息,是模式识别和文字信息处理领域重要的研究内容。本文提出一种有效的从场景图像中定位文本的方法,其原理为：首先基于边缘检测进行文本区域粗定位,对定位到的区域进行灰度检测,来确定文本域中的字符位置,其后对所得到的检测区域进行筛选,去掉噪声区域,获取到目标文本域。实验结果表明,本文提出的方法对字体的大小、样式、颜色、以及排布方向具有较强的鲁棒性, 能够准确定位并提取自然场景下的文本信息。     

国际音标图像字符细化方法

对图像文字进行细化有助于突出文字的形状特点和减少冗余的信息量,在文字识别 领域有着重要的应用。在分析研究传统细化算法后,针对传统细化出现的畸变、细化不完全现象, 提出了一种对国际音标图像字符的细化方法。该算法通过对文字区域的边缘分类标记,并判断被 标记点是否满足可去除条件,然后逐步去除边缘像素点,最终能让国际音标图像字符的宽度细化 到一个像素宽度。针对国际音标图像字符的实验表明,该算法能够准确地对国际音标图像字符进 行细化,且简单高效。     

A new method for expiration code detection and recognition using gabor features based collaborative representation

Text in images and video contains important information for visual content understanding, indexing, and recognizing. Extraction of this information involves preprocessing, localization and extraction of the text from a given image. In this paper, we propose a novel expiration code detection and recognition algorithm by using Gabor features and collaborative representation based classification. The proposed system consists of four steps: expiration code location, character isolation, Gabor features extraction and characters recognition. For expiration code detection, the Gabor energy (GE) and the maximum energy difference (MED) are extracted. The performance of the recognition algorithm is tested over three Gabor features: GE, magnitude response (MR) and imaginary response (IR). The Gabor features are classified based on collaborative representation based classifier (GCRC). To encompass all frequencies and orientations, downsampling and principal component analysis (PCA) are applied in order to reduce the features space dimensionality. The effectiveness of the proposed localization algorithm is highlighted and compared with other existing methods. Extensive testing shows that the suggested detection scheme outperforms existing methods in terms of detection rate for large image database. Also, GCRC show very competitive results compared with Gabor feature sparse representation based classification (GSRC). Also, the proposed system outperforms the nearest neighbor (NN) classifier and the collaborative representation based classification (CRC).     

Text detection on charts and graphs

Current Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems are not capable of detection and recognition of detached words on an image, especially if the text is not located horizontally. Such text blocks are typical of charts and graphs. In this paper an algorithm of detection of small text blocks with arbitrary orientation, color, style, and font size, which can be used for text localization before application of arbitrary character recognition system, is proposed. According to the experimental results, the use of the proposed algorithm for determination of the location and orientation of text blocks on charts and graphs and the transmission of this information to text recognition system allow increasing the fullness by 20 times and the text recognition precision by 15 times. The experiments were carried out on a test collection of 1000 charts containing about 14 000 text blocks, which was created by means of the XML/SWF Chart tool.     

Automatic text segmentation and text recognition for video indexing

Efficient indexing and retrieval of digital video is an important function of video databases. One powerful index for retrieval is the text appearing in them. It enables content-based browsing. We present our new methods for automatic segmentation of text in digital videos. The algorithms we propose make use of typical characteristics of text in videos in order to enable and enhance segmentation performance. The unique features of our approach are the tracking of characters and words over their complete duration of occurrence in a video and the integration of the multiple bitmaps of a character over time into a single bitmap. The output of the text segmentation step is then directly passed to a standard OCR software package in order to translate the segmented text into ASCII. Also, a straightforward indexing and retrieval scheme is introduced. It is used in the experiments to demonstrate that the proposed text segmentation algorithms together with existing text recognition algorithms are suitable for indexing and retrieval of relevant video sequences in and from a video database. Our experimental results are very encouraging and suggest that these algorithms can be used in video retrieval applications as well as to recognize higher level semantics in videos.     

Structure extraction from decorated characters using multiscaleimages

Decorated characters are widely used in various documents. Practical optical character reader is required to deal with not only common fonts but also complex designed fonts. However, since the appearances of decorated characters are complicated, most general character recognition systems cannot give good performances on decorated characters. In this paper, an algorithm that can extract character's essential structure from a decorated character is proposed. This algorithm is applied in preprocessing of character recognition. The proposed algorithm consists of three procedures: global structure extraction, interpolation of structure and smoothing. By using multiscale images, topographical features, such as ridges and ravines are detected for structure extraction. Ridges are used for extracting global structure and ravines are used for interpolation. Experimental results show character structures can be clearly extracted from very complex decorated characters     

Character independent font recognition on a single Chinese character

A novel algorithm for font recognition on a single unknown Chinese character, independent of the identity of the character, is proposed in this paper. We employ a wavelet transform on the character image and extract wavelet features from the transformed image. After a Box-Cox transformation and LDA (linear discriminant analysis) process, the discriminating features for font recognition are extracted and classified through a MQDF (Modified quadric distance function) classifier with only one prototype for each font class. Our experiments show that our algorithm can achieve a recognition rate of 90.28 percent on a single unknown character and 99.01 percent if five characters are used for font recognition. Compared with existing methods, all of which are based on a text block, our method can provide a higher recognition rate and is more flexible and robust, since it is based on a single unknown character. Additionally, our method demonstrates that it is possible to extract subtle yet discriminative signals embedded in a much larger noisy background     

融合LeNet-5改进的扫描文档手写日期识别

研究LeNet-5在扫描文档中手写体日期字符识别的应用,由于文档扫描的过程中会引入各种噪声,特别是光照和颜色干扰,直接使用LeNet-5算法不能取得较好效果。先在整份文档中对特定待识别字符的进行定位和划分,并对划分出的字符图像进行去噪、灰度化和二值化处理等预处理,接着将字符图像分割成一个个单个字符,然后在LeNet-5网络基础上结合模型匹配法实现对手写体日期字符的识别。分析在不同参数组合下的识别效果,调整算法模型参数有效地提升了模型对于实际对象的性能,实现出一种能够对手写体日期字符集实现较好识别效果的算法。实验结果表明了算法的有效性,并应用于具体工程实践。     

Text detection in chart images

Common OCR (Optical Character Recognition) systems fail to detect and recognize small text strings of few characters, in particular when a text line is not horizontal. Such text regions are typical for chart images. In this paper we present an algorithm that is able to detect small text regions regardless of string orientation and font size or style. We propose to use this algorithm as a preprocessing step for text recognition with a common OCR engine. According to our experimental results, one can get up to 20 times better text recognition rate, and 15 times higher text recognition precision when the proposed algorithm is used to detect text location, size and orientation, before using an OCR system. Experiments have been performed on a benchmark set of 1000 chart images created with the XML/SWF Chart tool, which contain about 14000 text regions in total.     

Text image super resolution using within-scale repetition of characters and strokes

In text images, there are some frequently used characters repeating more than others. Likewise, some characters have common strokes. This characteristic is used in this paper for machine-printed text-image super resolution. After segmenting the input low-resolution image into text lines and characters, 1) the characters are clustered and the clusters with large number of members, corresponding to the frequent characters, are detected. 2) A text-specific multiple-image super resolution is applied to the members of each large cluster and the result is verified by the recognition confidence of an OCR system. 3) A training example set is then constructed by extracting patches from the low-resolution frequent characters and their verified super resolution. Using this example set, infrequent characters are super resolved through the neighbor embedding SR algorithm. By placing all the super-resolved characters on their corresponding positions in the high-resolution grid, the final high-resolution image is generated. Our method achieves significant improvements in visual image quality and OCR character accuracy compared to related SR methods.     

视频图像中维吾尔文字的识别研究

提出了从复杂背景视频图像中提取文字并识别的一套算法,利用自适应迭代算法提取视频中维吾尔文字,针对维吾尔文字的一些特点,利用合适的预处理方法保留维吾尔文字中的各种点及特殊笔画,同时有效地消除了复杂背景带来的噪声。考虑维吾尔文字书写的特点,利用滑动窗口法提取文字特征避免了文字分割,将产生的特征向量输入到隐马尔可夫模型（Hidden Morkov Model）中进行训练和识别。