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US 8,014,604 B2Granted
OCR of books by word recognition
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsAsaf Tzadok, Eugeniusz Walach
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AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsAsaf Tzadok, Eugeniusz Walach
Estimating the term…
Disclosed embodiments of the invention provide automated global optimization methods and systems of OCR, tailored to each document being digitized. A document-specific database is created from an OCR scan of a document of interest, which contains an exhaustive listing of words in the document. Images of each word, taken from all the fonts encountered, are entered into the database and mapped to a corresponding textual representation. After entry of a first instance of an image of a word written in a particular font, each new occurrence of the word in that font can be quickly recognized by image processing techniques. The disclosed methods and systems may be used in conjunction with adaptive character recognition training and word recognition training of the OCR engines.
A computer-implemented method of image-to-text processing, comprising the steps of:
A computer software product for image-to-text processing, including a non-transitory computer storage medium in which computer program instructions are stored, which instructions, when executed by a computer, cause the computer to acquire an image of a document having words written thereon, segment said image into areas, each area containing one of said words, using said areas, define a dictionary containing reference images of said words, which comprise respective sequences of characters in respective fonts, along with respective codes corresponding to said words, compare said areas to said reference images and classifying said words in said document that match said reference images as identified words and classifying said words that do not match any of said reference images as unidentified words, generate respective new codes for one or more of said unidentified words, and adding said one or more of said unidentified words and said respective new codes to said dictionary for use in comparing other said areas of said document, and output a coded version of said document.
A data processing system for image-to-text processing, comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.
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From the US filing history. Foreign family members aren’t listed.
Design or setup of recognition systems or techniques; Extraction of features in feature space; Clustering techniques; Blind source separation:…
Analysing: determining representative reference patterns, e.g. by averaging or distorting; Generating dictionaries
Characterised by the type of writing: of cursive writing
Image and video recognition
About 3 years 8 months of term left · ends 7 Jul 2030 (estimated)
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to optical character recognition. More particularly, this invention relates to adaptive optical character recognition for books and other documents written in multiple fonts and languages.
2. Description of the Related Art
For a better understanding of the present invention, reference is made to the detailed description of the invention, by way of example, which is to be read in conjunction with the following drawings, wherein like elements are given like reference numerals, and wherein:
FIG. 1 is a schematic illustration of an image-to-text processing system, which is constructed and operative in accordance with a disclosed embodiment of the invention;
FIG. 2 is a high level flow chart of a method for image-to-text processing in accordance with a disclosed embodiment of the invention;
In the following description, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of the present invention. It will be apparent to one skilled in the art, however, that the present invention may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known circuits, control logic, and the details of computer program instructions for conventional algorithms and processes have not been shown in detail in order not to obscure the present invention unnecessarily.
As will be appreciated by one skilled in the art, the present invention may be embodied as a system, method or computer program product. Accordingly, the present invention may take the form of an entirely hardware embodiment, an entirely software embodiment (including firmware, resident software, micro-code, etc.) or an embodiment combining software and hardware aspects that may all generally be referred to herein as a “circuit,” “module” or “system.” Furthermore, the present invention may take the form of a computer program product embodied in any tangible medium of expression having computer usable program code embodied in the medium.
Any combination of one or more computer usable or computer readable medium(s) may be utilized. The computer-usable or computer-readable medium may be, for example but not limited to, an electronic, magnetic, optical, electromagnetic, infrared, or semiconductor system, apparatus, device, or propagation medium. More specific examples (a non-exhaustive list) of the computer-readable medium would include the following: an electrical connection having one or more wires, a portable computer diskette, a hard disk, a random access memory (RAM), a read-only memory (ROM), an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM or Flash memory), an optical fiber, a portable compact disc read-only memory (CDROM), an optical storage device, a transmission media such as those supporting the Internet or an intranet, or a magnetic storage device. The computer-usable or computer-readable medium could even be paper or another suitable medium upon which the program is printed, as the program can be electronically captured, via, for instance, optical scanning of the paper or other medium, then compiled, interpreted, or otherwise processed in a suitable manner, if necessary, and then stored in a computer memory. In the context of this document, a computer-usable or computer-readable medium may be any medium that can contain, store, communicate, propagate, or transport the program for use by or in connection with the instruction execution system, apparatus, or device. The computer-usable medium may include a propagated data signal with the computer-usable program code embodied therewith, either in baseband or as part of a carrier wave. The computer usable program code may be transmitted using any appropriate medium, including but not limited to wireless, wireline, optical fiber cable, RF, etc.