Learning on the fly: a font-free approach toward multilingual OCR

Despite ubiquitous claims that optical character recognition (OCR) is a “solved problem,” many categories of documents continue to break modern OCR software such as documents with moderate degradation or unusual fonts. Many approaches rely on pre-computed or stored character models, but these are vulnerable to cases when the font of a particular document was not part of the training set or when there is so much noise in a document that the font model becomes weak. To address these difficult cases, we present a form of iterative contextual modeling that learns character models directly from the document it is trying to recognize. We use these learned models both to segment the characters and to recognize them in an incremental, iterative process. We present results comparable with those of a commercial OCR system on a subset of characters from a difficult test document in both English and Greek.     

基于不对称性的相似汉字识别方法

相似字识别的正确与否对整个识别系统的准确性和可用性都有着极大的影响。在实际应用中,我们发现相似汉字之间的误识存在不对称性,并对这种不对称现象的成因进行了细致的探讨和分析。基于这种不对称性,本文提出了一种分类的部分空间方法来解决相似字的识别问题。相似字按其结构特点被分成若干基本类别,不同类别在相应的部分空间提取不同的特征进行比较,以达到正确识别相似字的目的。实验结果表明了本方法的有效性,相似字识别的准确性得到了很大的提高,其中易错相似字的识别正确率平均提高了4.55个百分点,不易错相似字的识别正确率平均提高了0.38个百分点。     

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。     

低质量汉字的分块搜索两级识别法

由于汉字笔画复杂,从视频中提取的汉字图像质量往往较差,采用传统光学字符识别(OCR)的结果不理想.为了解决低质量汉字图像的识别问题,提出一种基于分块搜索的两级识别方法.首先建立汉字图像的分块结构并模仿低质量汉字生成训练集,然后对训练集中各分块图像应用主成分分析提取特征并建立索引.待识别图像应用分块搜索和投票的方式从索引中获取候选汉字集合(一级识别),再根据投票结果的显著性辅以全局结构特征匹配识别汉字(二级识别).实验结果证明,该方法对于低质量汉字图像比普通的OCR方法具有更高的识别率.     

An intelligent character recognizer for Telugu scripts using multiresolution analysis and associative memory

The present work is an attempt to develop a robust character recognizer for Telugu texts. We aim at designing a recognizer, which exploits the inherent characteristics of the Telugu Script. Our proposed method uses wavelet multi-resolution analysis for the purpose extracting features and associative memory model to accomplish the recognition tasks. Our system learns the style and font from the document itself and then it recognizes the remaining characters in the document. The major contribution of the present study can be outlined as follows. It is a robust OCR system for Telugu printed text. It avoids feature extraction process and it exploits the inherent characteristics of the Telugu character by a clever selection of Wavelet Basis function, which extracts the invariant features of the characters. It has a Hopfield-based Dynamic Neural Network for the purpose of learning and recognition. This is important because it overcomes the inherent difficulties of memory limitation and spurious states in the Hopfield Network. The DNN has been demonstrated to be efficient for associative memory recall. However, though it is normally not suitable for image processing application, the multi-resolution analysis reduces the sizes of the images to make the DNN applicable to the present domain. Our experimental results show extremely promising results.     

Recognition of Handwritten Arabic Characters using Histograms of Oriented Gradient (HOG)

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of recognizing printed or handwritten text on paper documents. This paper proposes an OCR system for Arabic characters. In addition to the preprocessing phase, the proposed recognition system consists mainly of three phases. In the first phase, we employ word segmentation to extract characters. In the second phase, Histograms of Oriented Gradient (HOG) are used for feature extraction. The final phase employs Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classifying characters. We have applied the proposed method for the recognition of Jordanian city, town, and village names as a case study, in addition to many other words that offers the characters shapes that are not covered with Jordan cites. The set has carefully been selected to include every Arabic character in its all four forms. To this end, we have built our own dataset consisting of more than 43.000 handwritten Arabic words (30000 used in the training stage and 13000 used in the testing stage). Experimental results showed a great success of our recognition method compared to the state of the art techniques, where we could achieve very high recognition rates exceeding 99%.     

基于自适应尺度边缘特征的建筑施工图重叠字符识别方法研究

目前非重叠字符的识别技术已趋于完善,但难以识别建筑工程图纸标注等场景中的重叠字符,阻碍了基于二维扫描图纸的自动建模技术的突破。针对传统字符识别方法无法识别重叠字符的现状,提出了一套基于自适应尺度边缘特征的建筑施工图重叠字符识别新方法。基于像素空间分布特征初步确定重叠字符区域,定义并提取字符的自适应尺度边缘特征;借助双变量匹配概率函数筛选“位置+内容”的结果组合,并以全局最优原则代替绝对阈值作为识别标准,最终输出正确的识别结果。不同于先修复后识别的常规思路,该方法将特征匹配与干扰过滤相结合、字符定位与字符识别相关联,能解决百度等成熟商用 OCR 无法解决的重叠字符识别问题,且经数据实验证实具备较高的识别准确率。     

一种基于词片识别的字符分割算法

在字符识别领域,对粘连字符的识别是一个被广泛关注的技术难点,而且粘连字符的分割更是产生识别错误的主要原因之一.为了快速准确地进行字符分割,在总结已有方法的特点及不足的基础上,针对电子阅读笔系统的工作特点和实时性要求,提出并实现了一种面向电子阅读笔系统的基于词片识别的分割算法.该方法由于通过对字母组合的识别,降低了传统的基于孤立字符识别方法对于字符切分的要求,而且以中心生长法和改进的峰谷函数为切分工具来进行字符分割,简单实用,因而其在减少因粘连字符切分错误引起的识别错误的同时,不仅降低了运算复杂度,而且适合在阅读笔等嵌入式设备上应用.实验证明,该算法不仅效率高,而且实现简单,还能够降低分割错误带来的识别错误.     

Character location in scene images from digital camera

In this paper, a robust, connected-component-based character locating method is presented. It is an important part of an optical character recognition (OCR) system. Color clustering is used to separate the color image into homogeneous color layers. Next, for each color layer, every connected component in color layers is analyzed using black adjacency graph (BAG), and the component-bounding box is computed. Then, for coarse detection of characters, an aligning-and-merging-analysis (AMA) scheme is proposed to locate all the potential characters using the information about the bounding boxes of connected components in all color layers. Finally, to eliminate false characters, a four-step identification of characters is used. The experimental results in this paper have proven that the method is effective.     

Classification of incunable glyphs and out-of-distribution detection with joint energy-based models

Optical character recognition (OCR) has proved a powerful tool for the digital analysis of printed historical documents. However, its ability to localize and identify individual glyphs is challenged by the tremendous variety in historical type design, the physicality of the printing process, and the state of conservation. We propose to mitigate these problems by a downstream fine-tuning step that corrects for pathological and undesirable extraction results. We implement this idea by using a joint energy-based model which classifies individual glyphs and simultaneously prunes potential out-of-distribution (OOD) samples like rubrications, initials, or ligatures. During model training, we introduce specific margins in the energy spectrum that aid this separation and explore the glyph distribution’s typical set to stabilize the optimization procedure. We observe strong classification at 0.972 AUPRC across 42 lower- and uppercase glyph types on a challenging digital reproduction of Johannes Balbus’ Catholicon, matching the performance of purely discriminative methods. At the same time, we achieve OOD detection rates of 0.989 AUPRC and 0.946 AUPRC for OOD ‘clutter’ and ‘ligatures’ which substantially improves upon recently proposed OOD detection techniques. The proposed approach can be easily integrated into the postprocessing phase of current OCR to aid reproduction and shape analysis research.

     

手写中文地址识别后处理方法的研究

OCR(光学字符识别技术)作为方便有效的字体识别技术,在办公自动化、信息恢复、数字图书馆等方面发挥着日益重要的作用。语言模型在OCR后处理,特别是在中文的文字识别后处理方面有着广泛的应用。本文针对手写中文地址的后处理,讨论了语言模型的粒度对识别正确率的影响,分析了基于字和基于词的语言模型各自的优点和缺点,并采用了基于词的语言模型,在此基础上提出了加权词图搜索算法。实验证明,在58269条中文手写地址的测试集上,手写地址的整体识别率由原来的28.56%上升到了75.66% ,错误率下降了65.93% ,大大提高了系统的性能。     

打印文件鉴别打印机型的文字图像模糊识别*

探索了一种以打印件鉴别打印机型的文字图像计算机模糊识别方法.该方法收集标准常用字号和字体,以及常用打印机打印的文字,扫描采集,用改进的直方图波形分析法处理图像,提取文字的笔画总面积和笔画轮廓总周长等特征指标;再选定一种机型为参照,对各种机型相同字上述指标测量值及其几种组合的计算值,形成相对差值指标序列,建立信息数据库.在此基础上,建立对应指标的统计均值波动区间的值域表,并确定各指标的权重和建立权重系数矩阵.判断未知机型时,先按照前述方法任测100个常用字,利用OCR汉字识别模块和前述指标,自动辨识文字,进入模糊识别过程.根据相应检测字在值域表区间出现的概率,建立模糊关系矩阵.通过两个矩阵乘积的模糊变换产生判别矩阵.以最大隶属性确定打印机类型.按照数学模型,设计并实现打印机智能鉴别程序.应用实例测试,结果显示判别准确,符合设计预期.     

Direct extraction of topographic features for gray scale characterrecognition

Optical character recognition (OCR) traditionally applies to binary-valued imagery although text is always scanned and stored in gray scale. However, binarization of multivalued image may remove important topological information from characters and introduce noise to character background. In order to avoid this problem, it is indispensable to develop a method which can minimize the information loss due to binarization by extracting features directly from gray scale character images. In this paper, we propose a new method for the direct extraction of topographic features from gray scale character images. By comparing the proposed method with Wang and Pavlidis' method, we realized that the proposed method enhanced the performance of topographic feature extraction by computing the directions of principal curvature efficiently and prevented the extraction of unnecessary features. We also show that the proposed method is very effective for gray scale skeletonization compared to Levi and Montanari's method