Extraction of character strings from unformed document images

A method to extract character strings from unformed document images, which have inclined strings of character patterns and have no structure at all, is described. To process such kinds of unformed documents, previous schemes, which are intended only to deal with such documents as have just horizontal or vertical strings of characters, do not work well. The method is based on the idea that the processes of recognition and extraction of character patterns should cooperate together, and on the characteristic that the character patterns are located close to each other when they belong to the same string and apart when they do not. The method has been implemented and the experimental results show the robustness of the method