A study on the use of Gabor features for Chinese OCR

The authors revisit the topic of Gabor feature extraction for Chinese OCR. We adopt a very simple discriminant function to construct a maximum discriminant function based character recognizer. We experiment with a simple way of forming a feature vector for each character image by extracting Gabor features using one wavelength at locations uniformly sampled with one spatial resolution. Extensive experiments on large vocabulary Chinese OCR for both machine-printed and handwritten characters are performed by using a large amount of training and testing data to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Gabor features for Chinese OCR. Using Gabor features as raw features, we have constructed several state-of-the-art Chinese OCR engines.published_or_final_versio

Off-line Arabic Handwriting Recognition System Using Fast Wavelet Transform

In this research, off-line handwriting recognition system for Arabic alphabet is introduced. The system contains three main stages: preprocessing, segmentation and recognition stage. In the preprocessing stage, Radon transform was used in the design of algorithms for page, line and word skew correction as well as for word slant correction. In the segmentation stage, Hough transform approach was used for line extraction. For line to words and word to characters segmentation, a statistical method using mathematic representation of the lines and words binary image was used. Unlike most of current handwriting recognition system, our system simulates the human mechanism for image recognition, where images are encoded and saved in memory as groups according to their similarity to each other. Characters are decomposed into a coefficient vectors, using fast wavelet transform, then, vectors, that represent a character in different possible shapes, are saved as groups with one representative for each group. The recognition is achieved by comparing a vector of the character to be recognized with group representatives. Experiments showed that the proposed system is able to achieve the recognition task with 90.26% of accuracy. The system needs only 3.41 seconds a most to recognize a single character in a text of 15 lines where each line has 10 words on average

Feature Extraction Methods for Character Recognition

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Advances in Robotics, Automation and Control

The book presents an excellent overview of the recent developments in the different areas of Robotics, Automation and Control. Through its 24 chapters, this book presents topics related to control and robot design; it also introduces new mathematical tools and techniques devoted to improve the system modeling and control. An important point is the use of rational agents and heuristic techniques to cope with the computational complexity required for controlling complex systems. Through this book, we also find navigation and vision algorithms, automatic handwritten comprehension and speech recognition systems that will be included in the next generation of productive systems developed by man

Design of Mobile Application for Assisting Color Blind People to Identify Information on Sign Boards

Color blindness is a condition where a person cannot distinguish colors that are of similar contrast. This paper reports an attempt to develop a mobile phone application that can run on any Android or Windows smart phone. The developed application/software tool is able to assist color blind people by converting an image with low contrast to an image with high contrast. The objective of the proposed work was to develop a program on the LabVIEW platform to i) acquire the image whose information should be processed, ii) develop an algorithm to display a high-contrast crisp image of the actual dull image, and iii) identify the colors and characters present in the dull image for messaging to the user's phone. The work was implemented on the LabVIEW platform making use of various image processing tools to identify the color and text from the sign board that otherwise cannot be identified by color blind persons. The implementation was tested with several inputs to validate the performance of the proposed method. It was able to produce accurate results for more than 97.3% of the test inputs

A Novel Gabor Filtering and Adaptive Histogram Equalization Method for Improving Images

The correct information may only sometimes be effectively conveyed by images due to various factors, such as excessively bright or dark lighting and low or high contrast. As a result, picture improvement has become an essential part of digital image processing. This proposed method aims to develop an algorithm for improving photos captured in dark environments. This letter presents a new picture-enhancing approach that combines median and Gabor filtering using the wavelet domain with histogram equalization working over a spatial domain. The proposed method in this paper combines spatial and transformed domains for image enhancement and has been simulated using MATLAB. The simulation results of two different photos show that the suggested approach extends the histogram over a wide range of grayscale, offering a superior improvement to the original image. The novel proposed algorithm aims to improve image quality and visibility, making identifying essential details within the image easier. Further, the proposed technique's success is manifested by examining the produced photos' contrast and brightness. The findings reveal that the suggested technique beats the other strategies for improving low-contrast photos

Pattern detection and recognition using over-complete and sparse representations

Recent research in harmonic analysis and mammalian vision systems has revealed that over-complete and sparse representations play an important role in visual information processing. The research on applying such representations to pattern recognition and detection problems has become an interesting field of study. The main contribution of this thesis is to propose two feature extraction strategies - the global strategy and the local strategy - to make use of these representations. In the global strategy, over-complete and sparse transformations are applied to the input pattern as a whole and features are extracted in the transformed domain. This strategy has been applied to the problems of rotation invariant texture classification and script identification, using the Ridgelet transform. Experimental results have shown that better performance has been achieved when compared with Gabor multi-channel filtering method and Wavelet based methods. The local strategy is divided into two stages. The first one is to analyze the local over-complete and sparse structure, where the input 2-D patterns are divided into patches and the local over-complete and sparse structure is learned from these patches using sparse approximation techniques. The second stage concerns the application of the local over-complete and sparse structure. For an object detection problem, we propose a sparsity testing technique, where a local over-complete and sparse structure is built to give sparse representations to the text patterns and non-sparse representations to other patterns. Object detection is achieved by identifying patterns that can be sparsely represented by the learned. structure. This technique has been applied. to detect texts in scene images with a recall rate of 75.23% (about 6% improvement compared with other works) and a precision rate of 67.64% (about 12% improvement). For applications like character or shape recognition, the learned over-complete and sparse structure is combined. with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). A second text detection method is proposed based on such a combination to further improve (about 11% higher compared with our first method based on sparsity testing) the accuracy of text detection in scene images. Finally, this method has been applied to handwritten Farsi numeral recognition, which has obtained a 99.22% recognition rate on the CENPARMI Database and a 99.5% recognition rate on the HODA Database. Meanwhile, a SVM with gradient features achieves recognition rates of 98.98% and 99.22% on these databases respectivel