Design of a character driven text reading system

N. Pereira; Nikolaos G. Bourbakis

doi:10.1117/12.143621

14 April 1993 Design of a character driven text reading system

N. Pereira, Nikolaos G. Bourbakis

Proceedings Volume 1906, Character Recognition Technologies; (1993) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.143621
Event: IS&T/SPIE's Symposium on Electronic Imaging: Science and Technology, 1993, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

In this paper we present the hardware design and characteristics of a non-conventional text reading system. By non-conventional, we define a text reading system that is able to scan, detect, extract, and recognize the text characters directly from the `page' without sending strings of 0s and 1s to the host computer (which uses software techniques to recognize the text characters). The non-conventional system is also called `character-driven' OCR system. The system proposed here consists of six main parts, a raster scanner unit, the character pre- processing circuit, the FCC generation unit, the line-generator recognizer unit, the graph generator unit and the matching processor unit. In particular, the scanner array (GRAMMA) consists of (12 X 9) photo-cells and is driven by the 3-D motion mechanism to focus and extract the typed text. The gramma array produces a bit-map for the character which is then fed to the pre-processing circuit which applies curve fitting and thinning techniques to produce a normalized skeleton image of the character, which is fed to the FCC generator. The FCC generator produces a generic code string of the character which is passed on to the line generator recognizer unit which breaks the FCC string into straight-line and curve segments. The graph generator produces interrelations between the different segments. The graph form of the character is then fed to the matching processor which produces an appropriate ASCII code of the character. The non-conventional system can recognize typed as well as handwritten characters of different fonts and sizes.

Citation Download Citation

N. Pereira and Nikolaos G. Bourbakis "Design of a character driven text reading system", Proc. SPIE 1906, Character Recognition Technologies, (14 April 1993); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.143621

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available