Decorated character recognition by topological matching with self-organizing map

Character recognition is a classical issue which has been devoted by a lot of researchers. Making character recognition system more widely available in natural scene images might open up interesting possibility to use as an input interface of characters and an annotation method for images. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to recognize all sorts of fonts including decorated characters such as characters depicted on signboards. The decorated characters are constructed by using some special techniques for attracting viewers´ attentions. Therefore, it is hard to obtain good recognition results by the existing OCRs. In this paper, we propose a new character recognition system using SOM. The SOM is employed to extract an essential structure concerning the topology from a character. The extracted topological structure from each character is used to matching and the recognition is performed on the basis of the topological matching. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in most forms of characters.