Recognition of Degraded Handwritten Characters Using Local Features

The main problems of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems are solved if printed latin text is considered. Since OCR systems are based upon binary images, their results are poor if the text is degraded. In this paper a codex consisting of ancient manuscripts is investigated. Due to environmental effects the characters of the analyzed codex are washed out which leads to poor results gained by state of the art binarization methods. Hence, a segmentation free approach based on local descriptors is being developed. Regarding local information allows for recognizing characters that are only partially visible. In order to recognize a character the local descriptors are initially classified with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) and then identified by a voting scheme of neighboring local descriptors. State of the art local descriptor systems are evaluated in this paper in order to compare their performance for the recognition of degraded characters.