Methods and systems for efficient automated symbol recognition using multiple clusters of symbol patterns

Abstract

The current document is directed to methods and systems for identifying symbols corresponding to symbol images in a scanned-document image or other text-containing image, with the symbols corresponding to Chinese or Japanese characters, to Korean morpho-syllabic blocks, or to symbols of other languages that use a large number of symbols for writing and printing. In one implementation, the methods and systems to which the current document is directed carry out an initial processing step on one or more scanned images to identify, for each symbol image within a scanned document, a set of graphemes that match, with high frequency, symbol patterns that, in turn, match the symbol image. The set of graphemes identified for a symbol image is associated with the symbol image as a set of candidate graphemes for the symbol image. The set of candidate graphemes are then used, in one or more subsequent steps, to associate each symbol image with a most likely corresponding symbol code.