Multi-oriented Text Recognition in Graphical Documents Using HMM

The text lines in graphical documents (e.g., maps, engineering drawings), artistic documents etc., are often annotated in curve lines to illustrate different locations or symbols. For the optical character recognition of such documents, individual text lines from the documents need to be extracted and recognized. Due to presence of multi-oriented characters in such non-structured layout, word recognition is a challenging task. In this paper, we present an approach towards the recognition of scale and orientation invariant text words in graphical documents using Hidden Markov Models (HMM). First, a line extraction method is applied to segment text lines and the method is based on the foreground and background information of the text components. To effectively utilize the background information, a water reservoir concept is used here. For recognition of curved text lines, a path of sliding window is estimated and features extracted from the sliding window are fed to the HMM system for recognition. Local gradient histogram (LGH) based frame-wise feature is used in HMM. The experimental results are evaluated on a dataset of graphical words and we have obtained encouraging results.