Agency of Industrial Science and Technology

Other

Ministry of International Trade & Industry

Tokyo Keiki Company Limited

Totec Co. Ltd.

Shunji Mori

Seiichi Saito

Kunihiko Takeuchi

Nobuyuki Otsu

Taiichi Saito

Hiromitsu Yamada

Teruo Tsuchiya

Michihisa Do

Keiichi Anahara

Kazuhiko Yamamoto

An apparatus for recognizing visual patterns of handprinted characters or the like by means of an optical character reader which reads the patterns by a so-called outermost point method. While tracing the contour of the pattern stored in a two-dimensional memory, the distances from the starting point of the tracing and the integrated values of the coordinates of the points traced on the contour from the starting points are simultaneously obtained successively to extract outermost points for the series of contours. According to this outermost points, the contours are segmented into the convex line segments, concavity line segments and hole segments and the corresponding parameters of features of each segment are detected. Simultaneously, the convex line segment of which is shorter than a predetermined length is rejected and the remaining segments are subjected to matching operation in accordance with preliminarily prepared dictionary, thereby making a decision as to the pattern's identity.

Pattern reading system

Disclosed is an extraction method for optical character recognition systems in which the necessary character features for recognition process are extracted from a character information detected and digitized by an optical scanner. In accordance with this method, the local features of every adjacent two rows or columns of a digitized character pattern on a two-dimensional plane are extracted row by row or column by column and are successively integrated so as to extract in a global manner the respective feature types such as concavity and convexity, loop and connectivity of the character pattern. At the same time, the global feature regions or segments are separated and each of the separated feature segments is coded without any loss of the information. The feature quantity of each segment is obtained on the basis of the coded representation. Any local concavity or convexity noises are eliminated simultaneously with the extraction of the global features.

Feature extraction system for digitized character information

A method for character reading requiring no character segmentation, which method effects required character recognition by the steps of subjecting a given string of character patterns to continuous scanning to produce either a local feature vector at each of the intersections of rows and columns of character patterns or a global feature vector for each of the columns formed in consequence of the scanning, linearly consolidating either or both of the feature vectors to obtain a lower dimensional vector in new feature axes and continuously matching the vectors with the standard ones set in advance.

Method and apparatus for character reading

Growing community of inventors

Kashiwa, Japan

Shunji Mori