Abstract

The research presented in this thesis provides new solutions to two fundamental problems in document recognition. The first problem is character segmentation. Touching characters and character fragmentation caused by image degradation are difficult problems for current document recognition systems. The second problem that this thesis addresses is the dependence of today's document recognition systems on extensive font training. These two problems are shown to be the main reasons that cause performance breakdown for most of today's commercial document recognition systems. Our research provides solutions to the two problems by seeking alternative approaches that can recognize degraded documents with high accuracy and robust performance. Reliable performance on degraded documents is achieved by avoiding these two difficult problems in the recognition approaches. We propose to consider the computational task of document recognition as a process of finding the mapping between the visual pat...

Citations