Fast Convolutional OCR with the Scanning N-Tuple Grid

This paper introduces a novel high speed convolutional character recognition system. Convolutional mode operation means that no prior localization or segmentation of characters is required, making this mode extremely robust. The method uses a 2-d n-tuple grid to sample the image, but decomposes the address calculations into two onedimensional scans. This simple innovation leads to a very fast system, and speeds in excess of 100,000 recognitions per second have been achieved for a 10-class character recognition problem, when operated in convolutional mode. Quantitative performance results show an error rate of 4.3% on the MNist dataset of isolated hand-written characters. Qualitative results are presented on museum archive card images, indicating that the method has great potential for the character recognition component in a document image analysis system for images of this type.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICDAR
• Authors: Simon M. Lucas, Kyu Tae Cho
• Keywords: Character Recognition, Convolutional Character Recognition, Convolutional Mode, Document Analysis, ICDAR 2005