Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering (한국정보통신학회논문지)

The Korea Institute of Information and Commucation Engineering (한국정보통신학회)
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Development an Android based OCR Application for Hangul Food Menu

한글 음식 메뉴 인식을 위한 OCR 기반 어플리케이션 개발

  • Lee, Gyu-Cheol (Department of Electronic Engineering, Kwangwoon University) ;
  • Yoo, Jisang (Department of Electronic Engineering, Kwangwoon University)
  • Received : 2016.12.27
  • Accepted : 2017.02.14
  • Published : 2017.05.31
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Abstract

In this paper, we design and implement an Android-based Hangul food menu recognition application that recognizes characters from images captured by a smart phone. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is divided into preprocessing, recognition and post-processing. In the preprocessing process, the characters are extracted using Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER). In recognition process, Tesseract-OCR, a free OCR engine, is used to recognize characters. In the post-processing process, the wrong result is corrected by using the dictionary DB for the food menu. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments were conducted to compare the recognition performance using the actual menu plate as the DB. The recognition rate measurement experiment with OCR Instantly Free, Text Scanner and Text Fairy, which is a character recognizing application in Google Play Store, was conducted. The experimental results show that the proposed method shows an average recognition rate of 14.1% higher than other techniques.

본 논문에서는 스마트폰으로 음식 메뉴를 촬영한 영상으로부터 글자를 인식하는 안드로이드 기반의 한글 음식 메뉴 인식 어플리케이션을 설계하고 구현한다. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) 기술은 크게 전처리, 인식 그리고 후처리 과정으로 구분된다. 전처리 과정에서는 Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) 기법을 이용하여 글자를 추출한다. 인식 과정에서는 무료 OCR 엔진인 Tesseract-OCR을 이용하여 글자를 인식한다. 후처리 과정에서는 음식 메뉴에 대한 사전 DB를 이용하여 잘못된 결과를 수정한다. 제안하는 기법의 성능을 평가하기 위해 실제 메뉴판을 DB로 이용하여 인식 성능을 비교 측정하는 실험을 진행하였다. 구글 플레이스토어에 있는 글자 인식 어플리케이션인 OCR Instantly Free, Text Scanner 그리고 Text Fairy와 인식률 측정 실험을 진행하였으며 실험 결과 제안하는 기법이 다른 기법보다 평균적으로 14.1% 높은 인식률을 보여주는 것을 확인하였다.

Keywords

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