Character recognition and information retrieval

Presented are two technologies, character recognition and information retrieval, that are used for text processing. Character recognition translates text image data to a computer-coded format; information retrieval stores these data and provides efficient access to the text. The necessity of their eventual coupling is obvious. Their sequential application though (with no manual intervention) has been considered impractical at best. Our experimentation exploits these two technologies in just this way. We identify problems with their combined use, as well as show that the technologies have come to a point where they can be applied in succession

The Anatomy of Bangla OCR System for Printed Texts using Back Propagation Neural Network

This paper is based on Bangla (National Language of Bangladesh) Optical Character Recognition process for printed texts and its steps using Back Propagation Neural Network. Bangla character recognition is very important field of research because Bangla is most popular language in the Indian subcontinent. Pre-processing steps that follows are Image Acquisition, binarization, background removal, noise elimination, skew angle detection and correction, noise removal, line, word and character segmentations. In the post processing steps various features are extracted by applying DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) from segmented characters. The segmented characters are then fed into a three layer feed forward Back Propagation Neural Network for training. Finally this network is used to recognize printed Bangla scripts

A novel hybrid algorithm for morphological analysis: artificial Neural-Net-XMOR

In this study, we present a novel algorithm that combines a rule-based approach and an artificial neural network-based approach in morphological analysis. The usage of hybrid models including both techniques is evaluated for performance improvements. The proposed hybrid algorithm is based on the idea of the dynamic generation of an artificial neural network according to two-level phonological rules. In this study, the combination of linguistic parsing, a neural network-based error correction model, and statistical filtering is utilized to increase the coverage of pure morphological analysis. We experimented hybrid algorithm applying rule-based and long short-term memory-based (LSTM-based) techniques, and the results show that we improved the morphological analysis performance for optical character recognizer (OCR) and social media data. Thus, for the new hybrid algorithm with LSTM, the accuracy reached 99.91% for the OCR dataset and 99.82% for social media data. © TÜBİTAK

Entity Local Structure Graph Matching for Mislabeling Correction

International audienceThis paper proposes an entity local structure comparison approach based on inexact subgraph matching. The comparison results are used for mislabeling correction in the local structure. The latter represents a set of entity attribute labels which are physically close in a document image. It is modeled by an attributed graph describing the content and presentation features of the labels by the nodes and the geometrical features by the arcs. A local structure graph is matched with a structure model which represents a set of local structure model graphs. The structure model is initially built using a set of well chosen local structures based on a graph clustering algorithm and is then incrementally updated. The subgraph matching adopts a specific cost function that integrates the feature dissimilarities. The matched model graph is used to extract the missed labels, prune the extraneous ones and correct the erroneous label fields in the local structure. The evaluation of the structure comparison approach on 525 local structures extracted from 200 business documents achieves about 90% for recall and 95% for precision. The mislabeling correction rates in these local structures vary between 73% and 100%

Identification of Technical Journals by Image Processing Techniques

The emphasis of this study is put on developing an automatic approach to identifying a given unknown technical journal from its cover page. Since journal cover pages contain a great deal of information, determining the title of an unknown journal using optical character recognition techniques seems difficult. Comparing the layout structures of text blocks on the journal cover pages is an effective method for distinguishing one journal from the other. In order to achieve efficient layout-structure comparison, a left-to-right hidden Markov model (HMM) is used to represent the layout structure of text blocks for each kind of journal. Accordingly, title determination of an input unknown journal can be effectively achieved by comparing the layout structure of the unknown journal to each HMM in the database. Besides, from the layout structure of the best matched HMM, we can locate the text block of the issue date, which will be recognized by OCR techniques for accomplishing an automatic journal registration system. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach

A Book Reader Design for Persons with Visual Impairment and Blindness

The objective of this dissertation is to provide a new design approach to a fully automated book reader for individuals with visual impairment and blindness that is portable and cost effective. This approach relies on the geometry of the design setup and provides the mathematical foundation for integrating, in a unique way, a 3-D space surface map from a low-resolution time of flight (ToF) device with a high-resolution image as means to enhance the reading accuracy of warped images due to the page curvature of bound books and other magazines. The merits of this low cost, but effective automated book reader design include: (1) a seamless registration process of the two imaging modalities so that the low resolution (160 x 120 pixels) height map, acquired by an Argos3D-P100 camera, accurately covers the entire book spread as captured by the high resolution image (3072 x 2304 pixels) of a Canon G6 Camera; (2) a mathematical framework for overcoming the difficulties associated with the curvature of open bound books, a process referred to as the dewarping of the book spread images, and (3) image correction performance comparison between uniform and full height map to determine which map provides the highest Optical Character Recognition (OCR) reading accuracy possible. The design concept could also be applied to address the challenging process of book digitization. This method is dependent on the geometry of the book reader setup for acquiring a 3-D map that yields high reading accuracy once appropriately fused with the high-resolution image. The experiments were performed on a dataset consisting of 200 pages with their corresponding computed and co-registered height maps, which are made available to the research community (cate-book3dmaps.fiu.edu). Improvements to the characters reading accuracy, due to the correction steps, were quantified and measured by introducing the corrected images to an OCR engine and tabulating the number of miss-recognized characters. Furthermore, the resilience of the book reader was tested by introducing a rotational misalignment to the book spreads and comparing the OCR accuracy to those obtained with the standard alignment. The standard alignment yielded an average reading accuracy of 95.55% with the uniform height map (i.e., the height values of the central row of the 3-D map are replicated to approximate all other rows), and 96.11% with the full height maps (i.e., each row has its own height values as obtained from the 3D camera). When the rotational misalignments were taken into account, the results obtained produced average accuracies of 90.63% and 94.75% for the same respective height maps, proving added resilience of the full height map method to potential misalignments