A Complete Optical Character Recognition Methodology for Historical Documents

In this paper a complete OCR methodology for recognizing historical documents, either printed or handwritten without any knowledge of the font, is presented. This methodology consists of three steps: The first two steps refer to creating a database for training using a set of documents, while the third one refers to recognition of new document images. First, a pre-processing step that includes image binarization and enhancement takes place. At a second step a top down segmentation approach is used in order to detect text lines, words and characters. A clustering scheme is then adopted in order to group characters of similar shape. This is a semi-automatic procedure since the user is able to interact at any time in order to correct possible errors of clustering and assign an ASCII label. After this step, a database is created in order to be used for recognition. Finally, in the third step, for every new document image the above segmentation approach takes place while the recognition is...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DAS
• Authors: Georgios Vamvakas, Basilios Gatos, Nikolaos Stamatopoulos, Stavros J. Perantonis
• Keywords: Complete Ocr Methodology, DAS 2008, Document Analysis, Enhancement Takes Place, Segmentation Approach