A Fourier-descriptor-based character recognition engine implemented under the Gamera open-source document-processing framework

Jared Hopkins; Tim L. Andersen

doi:10.1117/12.589218

17 January 2005 A Fourier-descriptor-based character recognition engine implemented under the Gamera open-source document-processing framework

Jared Hopkins, Tim L. Andersen

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 5676, Document Recognition and Retrieval XII; (2005) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.589218
Event: Electronic Imaging 2005, 2005, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

This paper discusses the implementation of an engine for performing optical character recognition of bi-tonal images using the Gamera framework, an existing open-source framework for building document analysis applications. The OCR engine uses features that are based on the Fourier descriptor to distinguish characters, and is designed to be able to handle character images that contain multiple boundaries. The algorithm works by assigning to each character image a signature that encodes the boundary types that are present in the image as well as the positional relationships that exist between them. Under this approach, only images having the same signature are comparable. Effectively, a meta-classifier is used which first computes the signature of an input image and then dispatches the image to an underlying neural network based classifier which is trained to distinguish between images having that signature. The performance of the OCR engine is evaluated on a set of sample images taken from the newspaper domain, and compares well with other OCR engines. The source code for this engine and all supporting modules is currently available upon request, and will eventually be made available through an open-source project on the sourceforge website.

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Jared Hopkins and Tim L. Andersen "A Fourier-descriptor-based character recognition engine implemented under the Gamera open-source document-processing framework", Proc. SPIE 5676, Document Recognition and Retrieval XII, (17 January 2005); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.589218

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