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A Novel Character Segmentation Method for Text Images Captured by Cameras

  • Lue, Hsin-Te (Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University) ;
  • Wen, Ming-Gang (Department of Information Management, National United University) ;
  • Cheng, Hsu-Yung (Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University) ;
  • Fan, Kuo-Chin (Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University) ;
  • Lin, Chih-Wei (Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University) ;
  • Yu, Chih-Chang (Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Vanung University)
  • Received : 2010.03.13
  • Accepted : 2010.08.02
  • Published : 2010.10.31
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Abstract

Due to the rapid development of mobile devices equipped with cameras, instant translation of any text seen in any context is possible. Mobile devices can serve as a translation tool by recognizing the texts presented in the captured scenes. Images captured by cameras will embed more external or unwanted effects which need not to be considered in traditional optical character recognition (OCR). In this paper, we segment a text image captured by mobile devices into individual single characters to facilitate OCR kernel processing. Before proceeding with character segmentation, text detection and text line construction need to be performed in advance. A novel character segmentation method which integrates touched character filters is employed on text images captured by cameras. In addition, periphery features are extracted from the segmented images of touched characters and fed as inputs to support vector machines to calculate the confident values. In our experiment, the accuracy rate of the proposed character segmentation system is 94.90%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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