• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.14 no.10
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• pp.73-82
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• 2009

This paper proposes a variance recovery method for character strokes that can be missed in applying the previously proposed color variance approach in text detection of natural scene images. The previous method has a shortcoming of missing the color variance due to the fixed length of horizontal and vertical windows of variance detection when the character strokes are thick or long. Thus, this paper proposes a variance recovery method by using geometric information of bounding boxes of connected components and heuristic knowledge. We have tested the proposed method using various kinds of document-style and natural scene images such as billboards, signboards, etc captured by digital cameras and mobile-phone cameras. And we showed the improved text detection accuracy even in the images of containing large characters.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.8 no.11
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• pp.1449-1461
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose a vehicle recognition system based on the classification of vehicle identification mark and recognition of vehicle license plate. In the proposed algorithm, From the input vehicle image, we first simulate preprocessing procedures such as noise reduction, thinning etc., and detect vehicle identification mark and license plate region using the frequency distribution of intensity variation. And then, we classify extracted vehicle candidate region into identification mark, character and number of vehicle by using structural feature informations of vehicle. Lastly, we recognize vehicle informations with recognition of identification mark, character and number of vehicle using hybrid and vertical/horizontal pattern vector method. In the proposed algorithm, we used three properties of vehicle informations such as Independency property, discriminance property and frequency distribution of intensity variation property. In the vehicle images, identification mark is generally independent of the types of vehicle and vehicle identification mark. And also, the license plate region between character and background as well as horizontal/vertical intensity variations are more noticeable than other regions. To show the efficiency of the propofed algorithm, we tested it on 350 vehicle images and found that the propofed method shows good Performance regardless of irregular environment conditions as well as noise, size, and location of vehicles.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.680-686
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• 2006

Document images captured by scanners have only skewing distortion. But camera captured document images have not only skew but also vignetting effect and geometric distortion. Vignetting effect, which makes the border areas to be darker than the center of the image, make it difficult to separate characters from the document images. But this effect has being decreased, as the lens manufacturing skill is developed. Geometric distortion, occurred by the mismatch of angle and center position between the document image and the camera, make the shape of characters to be distorted, so that the character recognition is more difficult than the case of using scanner. In this paper, we propose a method that can increase the performance of character recognition by correcting the geometric distortion of document images using a linear approximation which changes the quadrilateral region to the rectangle one. The proposed method also determine the quadrilateral transform region automatically, using the alignment of character lines and the skewed angles of characters located in the edges of each character line. Proposed method, therefore, can correct the geometric distortion without getting positional information from camera.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.3 no.5
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• pp.433-444
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• 2000

The recognition of car plate was investigated by means of the enhanced fuzzy ART algorithm. The morphological information of horizontal and vertical edges was used to extract a plate area from a car image. In addition, the contour tracking algorithm by utilizing the SOFM was applied to extract the specific area which includes characters from an extracted plate area. The extracted characteristic area was recognized by using the enhanced fuzzy ART algorithm. In this study we propose the novel fuzzy ART algorithm different from the conventional fuzzy ART algorithm by the dynamical establishment of the vigilance threshold which shows a tolerance limit of unbalance between voluntary and saved patterns for clustering. The extraction rate obtained by using the morphological information of horizontal and vertical edges showed better results than that from the color information of RGB and HSI. Furthermore, the recognition rate of the enhanced fuzzy ART algorithm was improved much more than that of the conventional fuzzy ART and SOFM algorithms.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.6 no.12
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• pp.3683-3693
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• 1999

Most recognition methods of car licence plate have difficulties concerning plate recognition rates and system stability in that restricted car images are used and good image capture environment is required. To overcome these difficulties, I proposed a new recognition method of car licence plates, in which both intensity variation and color information are used. For a captured car image, multiple candidate plate-bands are extracted based on the number of intensity variation. To have an equal performance on abnormally dark and bright Images. plate lightness is calculated and adjusted based on the brightness of plate background. Candidate plate regions are extracted using contour following on plate color pixels in oath plate band. A candidate region is decided as a real plate region after extracting character regions and then recognizing them. I recognize characters using template matching since total number of possible characters is small and they art machine printed. To show the efficiency of the proposed method, I tested it on 200 car images and found that the method shows good performance.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.25-32
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose a new handwriting verification method using pattern analysis in off-line environments. The proposed method first segments character regions in a document and extracts effective features from the segmented regions. It then estimates the similarity between the extracted non-linear features and reference ones by using dynamic time warping and principal component analysis. Our handwriting verification method extracts handwriting features effectively and enables the verification of handwriting with various lengths of features as well as ones of short patterns. The experimental results show that our method outperforms others in terms as accuracy. We expect that the proposed method will automate the manual handwriting verification tasks and provide much objectivity on handwriting identification.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.684-689
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• 2005

In this paper, we propose car license plate recognition using morphological information and an enhanced neural network. Morphological information on horizontal and vertical edges was used to extract the license plate from a car image. We used a contour tracking algorithm combined with the method of histogram and location information to extract individual characters in the extracted plate. The enhanced neural network is proposed for recognizing them, which has the method of combining the ART-1 and the supervised teaming method. The proposed method has applied to real world car images. The experimental results show that the proposed method has better the extraction rates than the methods with information of the thresholding, the RGB and the HSI, respectively. And the proposed neural network has better recognition performance than the conventional neural networks.

• Proceedings of the Korea Inteligent Information System Society Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.202-206
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• 2005

우리나라 주민등록증은 주소지, 주민등록 번호, 지문 등 개개인의 방대한 정보를 가진다. 그런데 현재의 플라스틱 주민등록증은 위?변조가 쉬워 사회적으로 많은 문제를 일으키고 있다. 이러한 문제점을 해결하기 위하여 주민등록증을 전산화 하여 주민등록증 위조여부를 판단하고 있다. 본 논문에서는 주민등록증 영상을 자동 인식할 수 있는 개선된 ART2기반 RBF 네트워크를 이용한 주민등록증 자동 인식 방법을 제안한다. 제안된 방법은 주민등록증 영상에서 위치 정보와 수직 및 수평 히스토그램 방법을 이용하여 주민등록번호와 발행일 영역을 추출한다. 그리고 추출된 주민등록번호와 발행일 영역에서 4 방향 윤곽선 추적 알고리즘으로 개별 문자를 추출한다. 추출된 개별 코드는 개선된 ART2 기반 RBF 네트워크를 제안하여 인식에 적용한다. 제안된 ART2 기반 RBF 네트워크는 ART2알고리즘을 중간층으로 적용하고 중간층과 출력층 간의 학습은 일반화된 델타 학습에 모멘텀을 적용하여 학습 성능을 개선한다. 실제 주민등록증 영상을 이용하여 실험한 결과, 제안된 ART2기반 RBF 네트워크가 주민등록증 인식에 효율적인 것을 확인하였다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 1999.10b
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• pp.443-445
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• 1999

여러 가지 유형의 서식 문서를 자동으로 처리하려면 서식을 이해하는데 필요한 항목 영상을 추출하기에 앞서 서식을 분류(classification)해야 한다. 서식을 분류함에 있어서 서식 영상 전체를 다룰 경우 상당한 시간이 걸릴 수 있다. 왜냐하면 일반적으로 서식 문서 영상의 크기는 일반 문자 영상에 비해 상당히 클 뿐만 아니라 대상 서식 문서의 유형도 많아질 수 있기 때문이다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 문제를 해결하기 위한 방법으로서 DP 매칭에 의한 부분 매칭 방법을 제안하고자 한다. 실험 결과, 제안하는 방법은 서식 문서의 전체가 아닌 일부 영역만을 비교함으로써 인식 시간과 인식률 면에서 서식 문서를 효과적으로 처리할 수 있었다.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Communication Sciences Conference
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• 2006.07a
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• pp.449-449
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• 2006