Bbn Corporation

John I Makhoul

Richard M Schwartz

A language-independent and segment free OCR system and method comprises a unique feature extraction approach which represents two dimensional data relating to OCR as one independent variable (specifically the position within a line of text in the direction of the line) so that the same CSR technology based on HMMs can be adapted in a straightforward manner to recognize optical characters. After a line finding stage, followed by a simple feature-extraction stage, the system can utilize a commercially available CSR system, with little or no modification, to perform the recognition of text by and training of the system. The whole system, including the feature extraction, training, and recognition components, are designed to be independent of the script or language of the text being recognized. The language-dependent parts of the system are confined to the lexicon and training data. Furthermore, the method of recognition does not require pre-segmentation of the data at the character and/or word levels, neither for training nor for recognition. In addition, a language model can be used to enhance system performance as an integral part of the recognition process and not as a post-process, as is commonly done with spell checking, for example.

Growing community of inventors

Winchester, MA, United States of America

John I Makhoul