U.S. Philips Corporation

Matthijs Beun

Pieter Reijnierse

A device for skeletonizing characters imaged on a carrier, according to a two-dimensional regular pattern of positions, said device comprising a detector and storage means associated therewith, said detector feeding information of the characters into said storage means so that the characters are stored as digital information of character positions and background positions, respectively; skeletonizng means for receiving and changing information of character positions into those of background positions until the information of character positions have been reduced to information of character positions of skeleton characters whose stroke elements consist of a single series of character positions which succeed each other in accordance with an adjacency criterion, said skeletonizing means comprising a control unit associated with said storage means for controlling skeletonizing of said characters in cycles, said control unit operative in two modes, a first mode having at least one cycle and a second mode having at least one cycle; a first deciding unit connected to said control unit for receiving during a cycle of the first mode, at least the information of the character positions together with information of positions neighboring those character positions, said first deciding unit incorporating an edge criterion and associating additional information with the information of the character positions to compare whether said character positions satisfy said edge criterion; and, a second deciding unit connected to said first deciding unit for receiving the information of the character positions and those positions neighboring said character positions during said first mode, said second deciding unit incorporating a logic indispensability criterion and comparing the information of said character positions satisfying said edge criterion with said logic indispensability criterion, said second deciding unit receiving during a cycle of said second mode, information of remaining character positions, and comparing the remaining character positions with the logic indispensability criterion irregardless of whether said remaining positions satisfy said edge criterion.

Method of and device for skeletonizing characters

Characters are skeletonized to form skeleton characters consisting of single series of character positions. A skeletonizing cycle consists of one mark scanning operation, followed by two peeling scanning operations. The criteria for marking and peeling can be better adapted to each other in this manner. Skeletonizing, thus, is rendered substantially independent of the sequence in which the character positions are treated, so that notably the symmetry of the character elements remains the same. Moreover, the occurrence of random tails can be avoided to a substantial degree.

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Eindhoven, Netherlands

Matthijs Beun