The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 14, 1993
Filed:
Mar. 09, 1992
Charles L Wilson, Darnestown, MD (US);
Michael D Garris, Gaithersburg, MD (US);
Robert A Wilkinson, Jr, Hyattstown, MD (US);
The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of Commerce, Washington, DC (US);
Abstract
The system of the present invention applies self-organizing and/or supervd learning network methods to the problem of segmentation. The segmenter receives a visual field, implemented as a sliding window and distinguishes occurrences of complete characters from occurrences of parts of neighboring characters. Images of isolated whole characters are true objects and the opposite of true objects are anti-objects, centered on the space between two characters. The window is moved across a line of text producing a sequence of images and the segmentation system distinguishes true objects from anti-objects. Frames classified as anti-objects demarcate character boundaries, and frames classified as true objects represent detected character images. The system of the present invention may be a feedforward adaption using a symmetric triggering network. Inputs to the network are applied directly to the separate associative memories of the network. The associative memories produce a best match pattern output for each part of the input data. The associative memories provide two or more subnetworks which define data subsets, such as objects or anti-objects, according to previously learned examples. Multi-layer perceptron architecture may also be used in the system of the present invention rather than the symmetrically triggered feedforward adaptation with tradeoffs in training time but advantages in speed.