Design of a Chinese name card understanding system

In this paper, we present an automatic understanding system for Chinese name cards. After preprocessing of an input card image, we grouped characters into item blocks and segmented characters according to their aspect ratios and gap widths. After character extraction, we sent characters to a statistical multi-font character recognizer. We identified items according to their geometric characteristics and embedded key-characters. A user can edit segmentation results interactively and then save the results in the database for further applications. The high performance in the experiments shows the effectiveness of the proposed system.