一种新的粘连字符图像分割方法

针对监控画面采样图像中数字的自动识别问题,提出一种新的粘连字符图像分割方法。该方法以预处理后二值图像的连通状况来判定字符粘连的存在,并对粘连字符图像采用上下轮廓极值法确定候选粘连分割点,以双向最短路径确定合适的图像分割线路。仿真实验表明,该方法能有效解决粘连字符图像的分割问题。     

基于折线切分路径的粘连搭接字符切分算法的研究

针对粘连和搭接字符切分算法的不足,提出一种基于折线切分路径的字符切分算法。该算法利用投影法将粘连搭接字符与非粘连搭接字符分离开,而后结合粘连搭接字符独有的外形特征,通过引入惩罚权重的路径搜索算法快速而准确地得到粘连搭接字符间的折线切分路径;为了避免一些字符在以上的切分过程中被误切碎,利用识别反馈信息对一些字符子图像进行合并。实验结果表明,该算法对印刷体日英混排字符切分有很强的适应性,取得了较理想的切分效果。     

Independent component analysis for texture segmentation

Independent component analysis (ICA) of textured images is presented as a computational technique for creating a new data dependent filter bank for use in texture segmentation. We show that the ICA filters are able to capture the inherent properties of textured images. The new filters are similar to Gabor filters, but seem to be richer in the sense that their frequency responses may be more complex. These properties enable us to use the ICA filter bank to create energy features for effective texture segmentation. Our experiments using multi-textured images show that the ICA filter bank yields similar or better segmentation results than the Gabor filter bank.     

A comparison of segmentation methods and extended lexicon models for Arabic statistical machine translation

In this article, we investigate different methodologies of Arabic segmentation for statistical machine translation by comparing a rule-based segmenter to different statistically-based segmenters. We also present a method for segmentation that serves the needs of a real-time translation system without impairing the translation accuracy. Second, we report on extended lexicon models based on triplets that incorporate sentence-level context during the decoding process. Results are presented on different translation tasks that show improvements in both BLEU and TER scores.     

Multi-oriented touching text character segmentation in graphical documents using dynamic programming

The touching character segmentation problem becomes complex when touching strings are multi-oriented. Moreover in graphical documents sometimes characters in a single-touching string have different orientations. Segmentation of such complex touching is more challenging. In this paper, we present a scheme towards the segmentation of English multi-oriented touching strings into individual characters. When two or more characters touch, they generate a big cavity region in the background portion. Based on the convex hull information, at first, we use this background information to find some initial points for segmentation of a touching string into possible primitives (a primitive consists of a single character or part of a character). Next, the primitives are merged to get optimum segmentation. A dynamic programming algorithm is applied for this purpose using the total likelihood of characters as the objective function. A SVM classifier is used to find the likelihood of a character. To consider multi-oriented touching strings the features used in the SVM are invariant to character orientation. Experiments were performed in different databases of real and synthetic touching characters and the results show that the method is efficient in segmenting touching characters of arbitrary orientations and sizes.     

Structural analysis of Arabic handwriting: segmentation and recognition

In this paper, a structural method of recognising Arabic handwritten characters is proposed. The major problem in cursive text recognition is the segmentation into characters or into representative strokes. When we segment the cursive portions of words, we take into account the contextual properties of the Arabic grammar and the junction segments connecting the characters to each other along the writing line. The problem of overlapping characters is resolved with a contour-following algorithm associated with the labelling of the detected contours. In the recognition phase, the characters are gathered into ten families of candidate characters with similar shapes. Then a heterarchical analysis follows that checks the pattern via goal-directed feedback control.     

A new social and momentum component adaptive PSO algorithm for image segmentation

In this paper, we present a new variant of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for image segmentation using optimal multi-level thresholding. Some objective functions which are very efficient for bi-level thresholding purpose are not suitable for multi-level thresholding due to the exponential growth of computational complexity. The present paper also proposes an iterative scheme that is practically more suitable for obtaining initial values of candidate multilevel thresholds. This self iterative scheme is proposed to find the suitable number of thresholds that should be used to segment an image. This iterative scheme is based on the well known Otsu’s method, which shows a linear growth of computational complexity. The thresholds resulting from the iterative scheme are taken as initial thresholds and the particles are created randomly around these thresholds, for the proposed PSO variant. The proposed PSO algorithm makes a new contribution in adapting ‘social’ and ‘momentum’ components of the velocity equation for particle move updates. The proposed segmentation method is employed for four benchmark images and the performances obtained outperform results obtained with well known methods, like Gaussian-smoothing method (Lim, Y. K., & Lee, S. U. (1990). On the color image segmentation algorithm based on the thresholding and the fuzzy c-means techniques. Pattern Recognition, 23, 935–952; Tsai, D. M. (1995). A fast thresholding selection procedure for multimodal and unimodal histograms. Pattern Recognition Letters, 16, 653–666), Symmetry-duality method (Yin, P. Y., & Chen, L. H. (1993). New method for multilevel thresholding using the symmetry and duality of the histogram. Journal of Electronics and Imaging, 2, 337–344), GA-based algorithm (Yin, P. -Y. (1999). A fast scheme for optimal thresholding using genetic algorithms. Signal Processing, 72, 85–95) and the basic PSO variant employing linearly decreasing inertia weight factor.     

IESK-ArDB: a database for handwritten Arabic and an optimized topological segmentation approach

Even though a lot of researches have been conducted in order to solve the problem of unconstrained handwriting recognition, an effective solution is still a serious challenge. In this article, we address two Arabic handwriting recognition-related issues. Firstly, we present IESK-arDB, a new multi-propose off-line Arabic handwritten database. It is publicly available and contains more than 4,000 word images, each equipped with binary version, thinned version as well as a ground truth information stored in separate XML file. Additionally, it contains around 6,000 character images segmented from the database. A letter frequency analysis showed that the database exhibits letter frequencies similar to that of large corpora of digital text, which proof the database usefulness. Secondly, we proposed a multi-phase segmentation approach that starts by detecting and resolving sub-word overlaps, then hypothesizing a large number of segmentation points that are later reduced by a set of heuristic rules. The proposed approach has been successfully tested on IESK-arDB. The results were very promising, indicating the efficiency of the suggested approach.     

HMM/SVM segmentation and labelling of Arabic speech for speech recognition applications

Building a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) system requires a lot of hours of segmented and labelled speech data. Arabic language, as many other low-resourced languages, lacks such data, but the use of automatic segmentation proved to be a good alternative to make these resources available. In this paper, we suggest the combination of hidden Markov models (HMMs) and support vector machines (SVMs) to segment and to label the speech waveform into phoneme units. HMMs generate the sequence of phonemes and their frontiers; the SVM refines the frontiers and corrects the labels. The obtained segmented and labelled units may serve as a training set for speech recognition applications. The HMM/SVM segmentation algorithm is assessed using both the hit rate and the word error rate (WER); the resulting scores were compared to those provided by the manual segmentation and to those provided by the well-known embedded learning algorithm. The results show that the speech recognizer built upon the HMM/SVM segmentation outperforms in terms of WER the one built upon the embedded learning segmentation of about 0.05%, even in noisy background.     

A text summarizer for Arabic

Automatic text summarization is an essential tool in this era of information overloading. In this paper we present an automatic extractive Arabic text summarization system where the user can cap the size of the final summary. It is a direct system where no machine learning is involved. We use a two pass algorithm where in pass one, we produce a primary summary using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST); this is followed by the second pass where we assign a score to each of the sentences in the primary summary. These scores will help us in generating the final summary. For the final output, sentences are selected with an objective of maximizing the overall score of the summary whose size should not exceed the user selected limit. We used Rouge to evaluate our system generated summaries of various lengths against those done by a (human) news editorial professional. Experiments on sample texts show our system to outperform some of the existing Arabic summarization systems including those that require machine learning.     

A lexical analyser for Arabic

Practical natural language processing (NLP) systems such as database front-ends, deductive databases or object-oriented databases are at the forefront of research into the next-generation intelligent database systems. The research described in this paper has been aimed at integrating front-end paradigms and rule-based deduction to provide a single powerful framework for database systems in Arabic. The lexicon stores only roots of verbs and uses a program intelligent enough to handle all derived forms automatically. This is significant, as these alone represent 70% of the total dictionary. As part of the discussion of this system, its utility in such NLP applications as parsing and machine translation is examined.