Automatic Character Recognition

The survey of automatic character recognition techniques covered in this report has been conducted over a period of several years by teams of National Bureau of Standards personnel including, at various times, S. N. Alexander [and 10 others]. Much of the information herein was obtained through the courtesy of personnel of other organizations, especially those which are engaged in the design and development of reader devices.

"Much of pattern recognition theory and practice, including methods such as Support Vector Machines, has emerged in an attempt to solve the character recognition problem. This book is written by very well-known academics who have worked in the field for many years and have made significant and lasting contributions. The book will no doubt be of value to students and practitioners." -Sargur N. Srihari, SUNY Distinguished Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Director, Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR), University at Buffalo, The State University of New York "The disciplines of optical character recognition and document image analysis have a history of more than forty years. In the last decade, the importance and popularity of these areas have grown enormously. Surprisingly, however, the field is not well covered by any textbook. This book has been written by prominent leaders in the field. It includes all important topics in optical character recognition and document analysis, and is written in a very coherent and comprehensive style. This book satisfies an urgent need. It is a volume the community has been awaiting for a long time, and I can enthusiastically recommend it to everybody working in the area." -Horst Bunke, Professor, Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (IAM), University of Bern, Switzerland In Character Recognition Systems, the authors provide practitioners and students with the fundamental principles and state-of-the-art computational methods of reading printed texts and handwritten materials. The information presented is analogous to the stages of a computer recognition system, helping readers master the theory and latest methodologies used in character recognition in a meaningful way. This book covers: * Perspectives on the history, applications, and evolution of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) * The most widely used pre-processing techniques, as well as methods for extracting character contours and skeletons * Evaluating extracted features, both structural and statistical * Modern classification methods that are successful in character recognition, including statistical methods, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), structural methods, and multi-classifier methods * An overview of word and string recognition methods and techniques * Case studies that illustrate practical applications, with descriptions of the methods and theories behind the experimental results Each chapter contains major steps and tricks to handle the tasks described at-hand. Researchers and graduate students in computer science and engineering will find this book useful for designing a concrete system in OCR technology, while practitioners will rely on it as a valuable resource for the latest advances and modern technologies that aren't covered elsewhere in a single book.

Excerpt from Automatic Character Recognition: A State-of-the-Art Report Such techniques promise major advantages in a wide variety of data processing and data handling situations, specifically including thos-e of mechanized information selection systems and mechanized translation. These potential advantages include reductions in manpower requirements as well as reductions of errors and inaccuracies found in manual data transcription operations. This report incorporates the results of a fact-finding survey of automatic character reading techniques which was conducted by the National Bureau of Standards for the Rome Air Development Center in the period 1956-1957. The earlier survey has been extended and supplemented by study of the available literature, by continuing inspections of character reader devices, and by periodic discussions with research and development personnel interested in automatic character recognitiontechniques. The purpose of this report is therefore to review current developments in the-field of character recognition, with emphasis upon actual devices designed to identify printed or typed information. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the most prominent and successful example of pattern recognition to date. There are thousands of research papers and dozens of OCR products. Optical Character Rcognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier offers a perspective on the performance of current OCR systems by illustrating and explaining actual OCR errors. The pictures and analysis provide insight into the strengths and weaknesses of current OCR systems, and a road map to future progress. Optical Character Recognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier will pique the interest of users and developers of OCR products and desktop scanners, as well as teachers and students of pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and information retrieval. The first chapter compares the character recognition abilities of humans and computers. The next four chapters present 280 illustrated examples of recognition errors, in a taxonomy consisting of Imaging Defects, Similar Symbols, Punctuation, and Typography. These examples were drawn from large-scale tests conducted by the authors. The final chapter discusses possible approaches for improving the accuracy of today's systems, and is followed by an annotated bibliography. Optical Character Recognition: An Illustrated Guide to the Frontier is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, and information retrieval, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

As optical character recognition (OCR) begins to find applicationsranging from store checkout scanners to money-changing machines andpostal system automation, it has become one of the most dynamicareas in information science today. Yet few volumes explore thisdata-oriented process without relying heavily on mathematicalbackground reading. Now, Shunji Mori, Hirobumi Nishida, and Hiromitsu Yamada, among thefield's most respected researchers since its inception, presentthis self-contained, clearly written guidebook to OCR--the firstcomprehensive treatment of the preprocessing, feature-extraction,and systematic description-matching stages of the OCR process.Including a wealth of original research material available here forthe first time, this book is both an ideal professional referencesource and an excellent entry point for course work in thesubject. Key features of Optical Character Recognition: * Theoretical framework based on functional analysis--notpreviously available in a detailed, English-language version * Extensive explanation of preprocessing theory, including blurringand sampling, normalization, thinning, and binary and gray-scalemorphology * Intensive section on feature extraction, exploring linearmethods, structure analysis, and algebraic description * Original work on systematic shape description as a prerequisiteto matching * Original material on elastic matching, including imagerecognition of characters and objects * Requires only the standard undergraduate requisites of algebra,linear algebra, and advanced calculus

Optical character recognition and document image analysis have become very important areas with a fast growing number of researchers in the field. This comprehensive handbook with contributions by eminent experts, presents both the theoretical and practical aspects at an introductory level wherever possible.

The book offers a comprehensive survey of soft-computing models for optical character recognition systems. The various techniques, including fuzzy and rough sets, artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms, are tested using real texts written in different languages, such as English, French, German, Latin, Hindi and Gujrati, which have been extracted by publicly available datasets. The simulation studies, which are reported in details here, show that soft-computing based modeling of OCR systems performs consistently better than traditional models. Mainly intended as state-of-the-art survey for postgraduates and researchers in pattern recognition, optical character recognition and soft computing, this book will be useful for professionals in computer vision and image processing alike, dealing with different issues related to optical character recognition.