Confidence guided progressive search and fast match techniques for high performance Chinese/English OCR

In the past several years, we have been developing a high performance OCR engine for machine printed Chinese/English documents. We present two innovative techniques that contribute to the high efficiency in recognition of the mixed Chinese/English text line. They are (1) a progressive search strategy based on character verification, and (2) a tree-based fast match technique with a confidence-guided adaptive stopping mechanism. The efficacy of the proposed techniques is confirmed by experiments in a benchmark test.