International Business Machines Corporation

Shin Katoh

Hiroyasu Takahashi

Toshimichi Arima

Michitoshi Sumikawa

Kazuharu Toyokawa

Masayuki Fukita

An output mechanism of a character recognition device includes a category classifier for classifying image data of characters to be recognized for each category recognized in character recognition processing, a clustering processor for determining feature values related to shapes of characters included in the image data in each category classified by the category classifier, and for classifying the image data into one or more clusters based on the feature values, and a screen creator for creating a confirmation screen for displaying the image data for each cluster classified by the clustering processor.

Device for outputting character recognition results, character recognition device, and program therefor

Method for outputting character recognition results

Methods and apparatus are provided for removing ruled lines from a binary image containing character portions and ruled line portions, comprising the following steps. First, horizontal black runs in the bit-map image are detected and the detected black runs portions are stored as a run-length table comprising values of the horizontal start point and the length from the starting point of each black run for each vertical position. Then, based on the run-length table, black runs exceeding a predetermined threshold value are removed from the image to remove the ruled line comprising those black runs. Then, residual noise is eliminated from the image after the removal of the ruled lines. Then, in the image after the elimination of the residual noise, vertically disconnected components of a character are connected. Then, a portion of the character which is deleted by ruled line removal process is extracted from the image after the connection of vertically disconnected components of the character. Finally, the extracted portion of the character is interpolated in the image after the removal of the residual noise to restore the portion of the character removed by the ruled line removal process.

Method and apparatus for removing ruled lines

An interval �0, 1! of the output of neural network is equally divided into M (M being an integer of two or more), and the numbers or frequencies of data for the correct/incorrect patterns contained in the i-th interval �(i-1)/M, i/M! are .mu.1i and .mu.0i, respectively (where, i=1 . . . M). In this case, if this network provides an output contained in the i-th interval to unknown pattern data, this pattern is stored as a likelihood conversion table so that the pattern outputs likelihood P1i, which is a category, in an equation P1i=(.mu.1i+1)/(.mu.1i+.mu.0i+2). Then, when a value contained in the i-th interval �(i-1)/M, i/M! is output from a neural network, the likelihood convertor receives it as an input and outputs P1i which is so to speak normalized likelihood.

Pattern recognition method using a network and system therefor

A system and method for electronically segmenting character components on character-containing documents involving first scanning a document and quantizing the image information obtained by the scanning into two levels, e.g., black and white, by 1 and 0 bits, and from the quantized information, m-bit OR groups are generated by sequentially ORing every m-th bit in a first direction of the quantized image, where m is an integer equal to or greater than two. The black (character) bits in each of the m-bit OR groups are counted and processed using the steps of: sequentially calculating sums of n consecutive count values by shifting one by one the count values obtained by the counting along a second direction perpendicular to the first direction; and then, segmenting character components by comparing the sums with a predetermined threshold value. The ORing operations can be performed conveniently by employing the OR instruction provided in a typical microprocessor and can attain substantially the same accuracy as conventional OCR systems employing an m.times.n mask.

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Tokyo, Japan

Shin Katoh