A Complete Optical Character Recognition Methodology for Historical Documents

Author(s):  
G. Vamvakas ◽  
B. Gatos ◽  
N. Stamatopoulos ◽  
S.J. Perantonis
Author(s):  
Menbere Kina Tekleyohannes ◽  
Vladimir Rybalkin ◽  
Muhammad Mohsin Ghaffar ◽  
Javier Alejandro Varela ◽  
Norbert Wehn ◽  
...  

AbstractIn recent years, $$\hbox {optical character recognition (OCR)}$$ optical character recognition (OCR) systems have been used to digitally preserve historical archives. To transcribe historical archives into a machine-readable form, first, the documents are scanned, then an $$\hbox {OCR}$$ OCR is applied. In order to digitize documents without the need to remove them from where they are archived, it is valuable to have a portable device that combines scanning and $$\hbox {OCR}$$ OCR capabilities. Nowadays, there exist many commercial and open-source document digitization techniques, which are optimized for contemporary documents. However, they fail to give sufficient text recognition accuracy for transcribing historical documents due to the severe quality degradation of such documents. On the contrary, the anyOCR system, which is designed to mainly digitize historical documents, provides high accuracy. However, this comes at a cost of high computational complexity resulting in long runtime and high power consumption. To tackle these challenges, we propose a low power energy-efficient accelerator with real-time capabilities called iDocChip, which is a configurable hybrid hardware-software programmable $$\hbox {System-on-Chip (SoC)}$$ System-on-Chip (SoC) based on anyOCR for digitizing historical documents. In this paper, we focus on one of the most crucial processing steps in the anyOCR system: Text and Image Segmentation, which makes use of a multi-resolution morphology-based algorithm. Moreover, an optimized $$\hbox {FPGA}$$ FPGA -based hybrid architecture of this anyOCR step along with its optimized software implementations are presented. We demonstrate our results on multiple embedded and general-purpose platforms with respect to runtime and power consumption. The resulting hardware accelerator outperforms the existing anyOCR by 6.2$$\times$$ × , while achieving 207$$\times$$ × higher energy-efficiency and maintaining its high accuracy.


1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 58-77
Author(s):  
Vitaly Kliatskine ◽  
Eugene Shchepin ◽  
Gunnar Thorvaldsen ◽  
Konstantin Zingerman ◽  
Valery Lazarev

In principle, printed source material should be made machine-readable with systems for Optical Character Recognition, rather than being typed once more. Offthe-shelf commercial OCR programs tend, however, to be inadequate for lists with a complex layout. The tax assessment lists that assess most nineteenth century farms in Norway, constitute one example among a series of valuable sources which can only be interpreted successfully with specially designed OCR software. This paper considers the problems involved in the recognition of material with a complex table structure, outlining a new algorithmic model based on ‘linked hierarchies’. Within the scope of this model, a variety of tables and layouts can be described and recognized. The ‘linked hierarchies’ model has been implemented in the ‘CRIPT’ OCR software system, which successfully reads tables with a complex structure from several different historical sources.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-81
Author(s):  
Simone Zini ◽  
Simone Bianco ◽  
Raimondo Schettini

Rain removal from pictures taken under bad weather conditions is a challenging task that aims to improve the overall quality and visibility of a scene. The enhanced images usually constitute the input for subsequent Computer Vision tasks such as detection and classification. In this paper, we present a Convolutional Neural Network, based on the Pix2Pix model, for rain streaks removal from images, with specific interest in evaluating the results of the processing operation with respect to the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) task. In particular, we present a way to generate a rainy version of the Street View Text Dataset (R-SVTD) for "text detection and recognition" evaluation in bad weather conditions. Experimental results on this dataset show that our model is able to outperform the state of the art in terms of two commonly used image quality metrics, and that it is capable to improve the performances of an OCR model to detect and recognise text in the wild.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-39
Author(s):  
Kevin Purwito

This paper describes about one of the many extension of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), that is Optical Music Recognition (OMR). OMR is used to recognize musical sheets into digital format, such as MIDI or MusicXML. There are many musical symbols that usually used in musical sheets and therefore needs to be recognized by OMR, such as staff; treble, bass, alto and tenor clef; sharp, flat and natural; beams, staccato, staccatissimo, dynamic, tenuto, marcato, stopped note, harmonic and fermata; notes; rests; ties and slurs; and also mordent and turn. OMR usually has four main processes, namely Preprocessing, Music Symbol Recognition, Musical Notation Reconstruction and Final Representation Construction. Each of those four main processes uses different methods and algorithms and each of those processes still needs further development and research. There are already many application that uses OMR to date, but none gives the perfect result. Therefore, besides the development and research for each OMR process, there is also a need to a development and research for combined recognizer, that combines the results from different OMR application to increase the final result’s accuracy. Index Terms—Music, optical character recognition, optical music recognition, musical symbol, image processing, combined recognizer  


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