Development of character recognition system for the mixed font style in the steel processing material

In the steel production line, the molten metal of a furnace is transformed into billet and then moves to the heating furnace of the hot rolling mill. This paper describes about the development of recognition system for the characters, which was marked at the billet material by use template-marking plate and hand written method, in the steel plant. For the recognition of template-marked characters, we propose PSVM algorithm. And for the recognition of hand written character, we propose combination methods of CCD algorithm and PSVM algorithm. The PSVM algorithm need some more time than the conventional KLT or SVM algorithm. The CCD algorithm makes shorter classification time than the PSVM algorithm and good for the classification of closed curve characters from Arabic numerals. For the confirmation of algorithm, we have compared our algorithm with conventional methods such as KLT classifier and one-to-one SVM. The recognition rate of experimented billet characters shows that the proposing PSVM algorithm is 97 % for the template-marked characters and combinational algorithm of CCD & PSVM is 95.5 % for the hand written characters. The experimental results show that our proposing method has higher recognition rate than that of the conventional methods for the template-marked characters and hand written characters. By using our algorithm, we have installed real time character recognition system at the billet processing line of the steel-iron plant.