Matching of complex patterns by energy minimization

Two patterns are matched by putting one on top of the other and iteratively moving their individual parts until most of their corresponding parts are aligned. An energy function and a neighborhood of influence are defined for each iteration. Initially, a large neighborhood is used such that the movements result in global features being coarsely aligned. The neighborhood size is gradually reduced in successive iterations so that finer and finer details are aligned. Encouraging results have been obtained when applied to match complex Chinese characters. It has been observed that computation increases with the square of the number of moving parts which is quite favorable compared with other algorithms. The method was applied to the recognition of handwritten Chinese characters. After performing the iterative matching, a set of similarity measures are used to measure the similarity in topological features between the input and template characters. An overall recognition rate of 96.1% is achieved. © 1998 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Some Approaches to the Recognition of Handwritten Numerals

The present work deals with the recognition of handwritten isolated numerals by utilizing a recent approach, which aims at tackling the variability in the writing styles. A two pronged approach involving pre-classification and the recognition has been followed in this paper. For the pre-classification of numerals, two approaches have been presented. The first is heuristic based and the second is stroke based. A recent feature extraction method, namely sector data method, which takes care of variability in the handwritten numerals, has been incorporated into the system thus the variability involved in the writing styles of different individuals is taken care of by extracting features from the sector based approach. The back propagation neural networks have been used in the recognition process using the features extracted from the sector-based approach. On the basis of recognition rates obtained with samples written by different individuals, it is concluded that the sector based approach is better suited for the recognition of numerals when pre-classification is made on the basis of strokes

Template-Instance Loss for Offline Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition

The long-standing challenges for offline handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) are twofold: Chinese characters can be very diverse and complicated while similarly looking, and cursive handwriting (due to increased writing speed and infrequent pen lifting) makes strokes and even characters connected together in a flowing manner. In this paper, we propose the template and instance loss functions for the relevant machine learning tasks in offline handwritten Chinese character recognition. First, the character template is designed to deal with the intrinsic similarities among Chinese characters. Second, the instance loss can reduce category variance according to classification difficulty, giving a large penalty to the outlier instance of handwritten Chinese character. Trained with the new loss functions using our deep network architecture HCCR14Layer model consisting of simple layers, our extensive experiments show that it yields state-of-the-art performance and beyond for offline HCCR.Comment: Accepted by ICDAR 201

Four cornered code based Chinese character recognition system.

by Tham Yiu-Man.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1993.Includes bibliographical references.Abstract --- p.iAcknowledgements --- p.iiiTable of Contents --- p.ivChapter Chapter I --- IntroductionChapter 1.1 --- Introduction --- p.1-1Chapter 1.2 --- Survey on Chinese Character Recognition --- p.1-4Chapter 1.3 --- Methodology Adopts in Our System --- p.1-7Chapter 1.4 --- Contributions and Organization of the Thesis --- p.1-11Chapter Chapter II --- Pre-processing and Stroke ExtractionChapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.2-1Chapter 2.2 --- Thinning --- p.2-1Chapter 2.2.1 --- Introduction to Thinning --- p.2-1Chapter 2.2.2 --- Proposed Thinning Algorithm Cater for Stroke Extraction --- p.2-6Chapter 2.2.3 --- Thinning Results --- p.2-9Chapter 2.3 --- Stroke Extraction --- p.2-13Chapter 2.3.1 --- Introduction to Stroke Extraction --- p.2-13Chapter 2.3.2 --- Proposed Stroke Extraction Method --- p.2-14Chapter 2.3.2.1 --- Fork point detection --- p.2-16Chapter 2.3.2.2 --- 8-connected fork point merging --- p.2-18Chapter 2.3.2.3 --- Sub-stroke extraction --- p.2-18Chapter 2.3.2.4 --- Fork point merging --- p.2-19Chapter 2.3.2.5 --- Sub-stroke connection --- p.2-24Chapter 2.3.3 --- Stroke Extraction Accuracy --- p.2-27Chapter 2.3.4 --- Corner Detection --- p.2-29Chapter 2.3.4.1 --- Introduction to Corner Detection --- p.2-29Chapter 2.3.4.2 --- Proposed Corner Detection Formulation --- p.2-30Chapter 2.4 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.2-33Chapter Chapter III --- Four Corner CodeChapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.3-1Chapter 3.2 --- Deletion of Hook Strokes --- p.3-3Chapter 3.3 --- Stroke Types Selection --- p.3-5Chapter 3.4 --- Probability Formulations of Stroke Types --- p.3-7Chapter 3.4.1 --- Simple Strokes --- p.3-7Chapter 3.4.2 --- Square --- p.3-8Chapter 3.4.3 --- Cross --- p.3-10Chapter 3.4.4 --- Upper Right Corner --- p.3-12Chapter 3.4.5 --- Lower Left Corner --- p.3-12Chapter 3.5 --- Corner Segments Extraction Procedure --- p.3-14Chapter 3.5.1 --- Corner Segment Probability --- p.3-21Chapter 3.5.2 --- Corner Segment Extraction --- p.3-23Chapter 3.6 4 --- C Codes Generation --- p.3-26Chapter 3.7 --- Parameters Determination --- p.3-29Chapter 3.8 --- Sensitivity Test --- p.3-31Chapter 3.9 --- Classification Rate --- p.3-32Chapter 3.10 --- Feedback by Corner Segments --- p.3-34Chapter 3.11 --- Classification Rate with Feedback by Corner Segment --- p.3-37Chapter 3.12 --- Reasons for Mis-classification --- p.3-38Chapter 3.13 --- Suggested Solution to the Mis-interpretation of Stroke Type --- p.3-41Chapter 3.14 --- Reduce Size of Candidate Set by No.of Input Segments --- p.3-43Chapter 3.15 --- Extension to Higher Order Code --- p.3-45Chapter 3.16 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.3-46Chapter Chapter IV --- RelaxationChapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.4-1Chapter 4.1.1 --- Introduction to Relaxation --- p.4-1Chapter 4.1.2 --- Formulation of Relaxation --- p.4-2Chapter 4.1.3 --- Survey on Chinese Character Recognition by using Relaxation --- p.4-5Chapter 4.2 --- Relaxation Formulations --- p.4-9Chapter 4.2.1 --- Definition of Neighbour Segments --- p.4-9Chapter 4.2.2 --- Formulation of Initial Probability Assignment --- p.4-12Chapter 4.2.3 --- Formulation of Compatibility Function --- p.4-14Chapter 4.2.4 --- Formulation of Support from Neighbours --- p.4-16Chapter 4.2.5 --- Stopping Criteria --- p.4-17Chapter 4.2.6 --- Distance Measures --- p.4-17Chapter 4.2.7 --- Parameters Determination --- p.4-21Chapter 4.3 --- Recognition Rate --- p.4-23Chapter 4.4 --- Reasons for Mis-recognition in Relaxation --- p.4-27Chapter 4.5 --- Introduction of No-label Class --- p.4-31Chapter 4.5.1 --- No-label Initial Probability --- p.4-31Chapter 4.5.2 --- No-label Compatibility Function --- p.4-32Chapter 4.5.3 --- Improvement by No-label Class --- p.4-33Chapter 4.6 --- Rate of Convergence --- p.4-35Chapter 4.6.1 --- Updating Formulae in Exponential Form --- p.4-38Chapter 4.7 --- Comparison with Yamamoto et al's Relaxation Method --- p.4-40Chapter 4.7.1 --- Formulations in Yamamoto et al's Relaxation Method --- p.4-40Chapter 4.7.2 --- Modifications in [YAMAM82] --- p.4-42Chapter 4.7.3 --- Performance Comparison with [YAMAM82] --- p.4-43Chapter 4.8 --- System Overall Recognition Rate --- p.4-45Chapter 4.9 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.4-48Chapter Chapter V --- Concluding RemarksChapter 5.1 --- Recapitulation and Conclusions --- p.5-1Chapter 5.2 --- Limitations in the System --- p.5-4Chapter 5.3 --- Suggestions for Further Developments --- p.5-6References --- p.R-1Appendix User's GuideChapter A .l --- System Functions --- p.A-1Chapter A.2 --- Platform and Compiler --- p.A-1Chapter A.3 --- File List --- p.A-2Chapter A.4 --- Directory --- p.A-3Chapter A.5 --- Description of Sub-routines --- p.A-3Chapter A.6 --- Data Structures and Header Files --- p.A-12Chapter A.7 --- Character File charfile Structure --- p.A-15Chapter A.8 --- Suggested Program to Implement the System --- p.A-1

GROUNDTRUTH GENERATION AND DOCUMENT IMAGE DEGRADATION

The problem of generating synthetic data for the training and evaluation of document analysis systems has been widely addressed in recent years. With the increased interest in processing multilingual sources, however, there is a tremendous need to be able to rapidly generate data in new languages and scripts, without the need to develop specialized systems. We have developed a system, which uses language support of the MS Windows operating system combined with custom print drivers to render tiff images simultaneously with windows Enhanced Metafile directives. The metafile information is parsed to generate zone, line, word, and character ground truth including location, font information and content in any language supported by Windows. The resulting images can be physically or synthetically degraded by our degradation modules, and used for training and evaluating Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems. Our document image degradation methodology incorporates several often-encountered types of noise at the page and pixel levels. Examples of OCR evaluation and synthetically degraded document images are given to demonstrate the effectiveness

A discrete contextual stochastic model for the off-line recognition of handwritten Chinese characters

We study a discrete contextual stochastic (CS) model for complex and variant patterns like handwritten Chinese characters. Three fundamental problems of using CS models for character recognition are discussed, and several practical techniques for solving these problems are investigated. A formulation for discriminative training of CS model parameters is also introduced and its practical usage investigated. To illustrate the characteristics of the various algorithms, comparative experiments are performed on a recognition task with a vocabulary consisting of 50 pairs of highly similar handwritten Chinese characters. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the discriminative training for improving recognition performance.published_or_final_versio

Content Recognition and Context Modeling for Document Analysis and Retrieval

The nature and scope of available documents are changing significantly in many areas of document analysis and retrieval as complex, heterogeneous collections become accessible to virtually everyone via the web. The increasing level of diversity presents a great challenge for document image content categorization, indexing, and retrieval. Meanwhile, the processing of documents with unconstrained layouts and complex formatting often requires effective leveraging of broad contextual knowledge. In this dissertation, we first present a novel approach for document image content categorization, using a lexicon of shape features. Each lexical word corresponds to a scale and rotation invariant local shape feature that is generic enough to be detected repeatably and is segmentation free. A concise, structurally indexed shape lexicon is learned by clustering and partitioning feature types through graph cuts. Our idea finds successful application in several challenging tasks, including content recognition of diverse web images and language identification on documents composed of mixed machine printed text and handwriting. Second, we address two fundamental problems in signature-based document image retrieval. Facing continually increasing volumes of documents, detecting and recognizing unique, evidentiary visual entities (\eg, signatures and logos) provides a practical and reliable supplement to the OCR recognition of printed text. We propose a novel multi-scale framework to detect and segment signatures jointly from document images, based on the structural saliency under a signature production model. We formulate the problem of signature retrieval in the unconstrained setting of geometry-invariant deformable shape matching and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in signature matching and verification. Third, we present a model-based approach for extracting relevant named entities from unstructured documents. In a wide range of applications that require structured information from diverse, unstructured document images, processing OCR text does not give satisfactory results due to the absence of linguistic context. Our approach enables learning of inference rules collectively based on contextual information from both page layout and text features. Finally, we demonstrate the importance of mining general web user behavior data for improving document ranking and other web search experience. The context of web user activities reveals their preferences and intents, and we emphasize the analysis of individual user sessions for creating aggregate models. We introduce a novel algorithm for estimating web page and web site importance, and discuss its theoretical foundation based on an intentional surfer model. We demonstrate that our approach significantly improves large-scale document retrieval performance

A Review on Improve Handwritten character recognition by using Convolutional Neural Network

For image recognition CNN is the most popular learning model. The features like weight sharing strategy and strong relations of the pixels of the image makes CNN best choice for image recognition. The feature extraction and classification can be done simultaneously in deep learning models which has proved very needful compared to the traditional methods. A promising recognition can be obtained by using CNN if we address to certain issues. So in CNN based framework for handwritten character recognition that gives a better performance compared to other CNN based recognition methods

Detecting Multilingual Lines of Text with Fusion Moves

This thesis proposes an optimization-based algorithm for detecting lines of text in images taken by hand-held cameras. The majority of existing methods for this problem assume alphabet-based texts (e.g. in Latin or Greek) and they use heuristics specific to such texts: proximity between letters within one line, larger distance between separate lines, etc. We are interested in a more challenging problem where images combine alphabet and logographic characters from multiple languages where typographic rules vary a lot (e.g. English, Korean, and Chinese). Significantly higher complexity of fitting multiple lines of text in different languages calls for an energy-based formulation combining a data fidelity term and a regularization prior. Our data cost combines geometric errors and likelihoods given by a classifier trained to low-level features in each language. Our regularization term encourages sparsity based on label costs. Our energy can be efficiently minimized by fusion moves. The algorithm was evaluated on a database of images from the subway of metropolitan area of Seoul and was proven to be robust