A segmentation-free approach to OCR

When confronted with degraded images of text, however, the performance of many commercial OCR systems deteriorates severely. This occurs because all these systems rely on a segmentation step that is prone to error in the presence of image noise and printing artifacts. The authors present a novel OCR approach that overcomes this problem by eliminating the segmentation step altogether. This approach is based on the concept and techniques of occluded object recognition. To achieve high efficiency as well as robustness, they incorporate the notions of indexing and voting, and tailor them to the problem of OCR. Preliminary experimental results are given