A Study on the Feature Extraction for High Speed Character Recognition -By Using Interative Extraction and Hierarchical Formation of Directional Information-

고속 문자 인식을 위한 특징량 추출에 관한 연구 - 방향정보의 반복적 추출과 특징량의 계층성을 이용하여 -

In this paper, a new method of character recognition is proposed. It uses density information, in addition to positional and directional information generally used, to recognize a character. Four directional feature primitives are extracted from the thinning templates on the observation that the output of the templates have directional property in general. A simple and fast feature extraction scheme is possible. Features are organized from recursive nonary tree(N-tree) that corresponds to normalized character area. Each node of the N-tree has four directional features that are sum of the features of it's nine sub-nodes. Every feature primitive from the templates are added to the corresponding leaf and then summed to the upper nodes successively. Recognition can be accomplished by using appropriate feature level of N-tree. Also, effectiveness of each node's feature vector was tested by experiment. A method to implement the proposed feature vector organization algorithm into hardware is proposed as well. The third generation node, which is 4$\times$4, is used as a unit processing element to extract features, and it was implemented in hardware. As a result, we could observe that it is possible to extract feature vector for real-time processing.