At+t Corp.

At&t Bell Laboratories

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Yann Andre LeCun

Christopher John Burges

Yann A Le Cun

Timothy J Thompson

William D Satterfield

Apparatus and processes are described for the automatic recognition of alphanumeric images. A set of cuts are made to the image which include incorrect segmentations. The resulting 'cells' comprising in their totality the created segments of the image are then analyzed to determine which cells are legal neighbors and which are not. All cells which are legal neighbors are then presented as connected nodes. A pruning of nodes which are related to certain predetermined image cuts is effected. Each set of remaining connected nodes is then presented to a recognizer which identifies the image and assigns a specified probability to the output. Many cells which are not legal neighbors are thereby not presented to the recognizer, thus saving substantially on computations per recognized image.

Graphical system for automated segmentation and recognition for image

Segmentation of characters in a character set (10), made by placing a dark mark against a light background (12), is accomplished by establishing a vertical pixel projection for each pixel column in the image. The vertical pixel projections are filtered with a decay parameter so those pixel columns which contain only background have the highest projection. Thereafter, a set of 'cut-points' (points of image segmentation) is obtained so that each cut-point coincides with a pixel column whose vertical pixel projection is both a local maxima and exceeds a predetermined threshold. The number of such cut-points is counted and if the number is not significantly greater than a predetermined number, the image is segmented along the cut-points. Otherwise, the vertical projections of those pixel columns coincident with the cut-points are filtered with a decreasing threshold to reduce the number of potential cut-points.

Method and apparatus for image segmentation

Growing community of inventors

Escondido Village, CA, United States of America

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