An approach to preprocess degraded text images based on morphological filters

Author

Kong, Hongwei ; Peng, Liangrui ; Ding, Xiaoqing

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electron. Eng., Tsinghua Univ., Beijing, China

Volume

2

fYear

1998

fDate

1998

Firstpage

1068

Abstract

The recognition rate of OCR (optical character recognition) systems often decreases for degraded text images, such as stroke-connected, stroke-broken and noisy text images. In this paper a unified method for preprocessing binary text images based on mathematical morphology is presented. Simple but effective morphological filters are designed to process stroke-connected and stroke-broken images separately. A method to classify stroke-connected and stroke-broken text images based on the horizontal and vertical average stroke width is also presented. A morphological contour filter is used for removing noise. Experimental results show that the result of the preprocessing method are satisfactory

Keywords

filtering theory; image recognition; mathematical morphology; optical character recognition; OCR; degraded text images; morphological contour filter; morphological filters; noisy text images; optical character recognition; recognition rate; stroke-broken text images; stroke-connected text images; Character recognition; Degradation; Image recognition; Libraries; Morphology; Optical character recognition software; Optical filters; Optical noise; Process design; Text recognition;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Signal Processing Proceedings, 1998. ICSP '98. 1998 Fourth International Conference on

Conference_Location

Beijing

Print_ISBN

0-7803-4325-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICOSP.1998.770800

Filename

770800