• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.6-10
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• 2021

Recognition of characters printed or marked on the PCB components from images captured using cameras is an important task in PCB components inspection systems. Previous optical character recognition (OCR) of PCB components typically consists of two stages: character segmentation and classification of each segmented character. However, character segmentation often fails due to corrupted characters, low image contrast, etc. Thus, OCR without character segmentation is desirable and increasingly used via deep neural networks. Typical implementation based on deep neural nets without character segmentation includes convolutional neural network followed by recurrent neural network (RNN). However, one disadvantage of this approach is slow execution due to RNN layers. LPRNet is a segmentation-free character recognition network with excellent accuracy proved in license plate recognition. LPRNet uses a wide convolution instead of RNN, thus enabling fast inference. In this paper, LPRNet was adapted for recognizing characters printed on PCB components with fast execution and high accuracy. Initial training with synthetic images followed by fine-tuning on real text images yielded accurate recognition. This net can be further optimized on Intel CPU using OpenVINO tool kit. The optimized version of the network can be run in real-time faster than even GPU.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2000.11c
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• pp.145-148
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• 2000

This paper proposes a character segmentation method for Korean letter address image. The poor quality of image binarization results in broken character strokes. To overcome this problem, two steps of processing ate introduced. The first one is to merge broken characters to generate character candidates, and the other one is to reduce the complexity of segmentation graph path. These two steps do not use recognition information to keep in high-speed.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.784-787
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• 2006

In this paper, we propose a method for nonlinear grapheme segmentation in Korean printed character type classification. The characters are subdivided into six types based on character type information. The feature vector is consist of mesh features, vertical projection features and horizontal projection features which are extracted from gray-level images. We classify characters into 6 types using Back propagation. Character segmentation regions are determined based on character type information. Then, an optimal nonlinear grapheme segmentation path is found using multi-stage graph search algorithm. As the result, a proposed methodology is proper to classify character type and to find nonlinear char segmentation paths.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.21-25
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• 2004

This paper presents a typographical analyses and classes. Typographical analysis is an indispensable tool for machine-printed character recognition in English. This analysis is a preliminary step for character segmentation in OCR. This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, word typographical classes from words are defined by the word typographical analysis. In the second part, character typographical classes from connected components are defined by the character typographical analysis. The character typographical classes are used in the character segmentation.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.163-172
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• 2017

A high performance license plate recognition system (LPRS) is proposed in this work. The proposed LPRS is composed of the following three main stages: (i) plate region determination, (ii) character segmentation, and (iii) character recognition. During the plate region determination stage, the image is enhanced by image processing algorithms to increase system performance. The rectangular license plate region is obtained using edge-based image processing methods on the binarized image. With the help of skew correction, the plate region is prepared for the character segmentation stage. Characters are separated from each other using vertical projections on the plate region. Segmented characters are prepared for the character recognition stage by a thinning process. At the character recognition stage, a three-layer feedforward artificial neural network using a backpropagation learning algorithm is constructed and the characters are determined.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.12B no.3 s.99
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• pp.337-342
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• 2005

This paper presents a typographical analyses and classes. Typographical analysis is an indispensable tool for machine-printed character recognition in English. This analysis is a preliminary step for character segmentation in OCR(Optical Character Recognition). This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, word typographical classes from words are defined by the word typographical analysis. In the second part, character typographical classes from connected components are defined by the character typographical analysis. The character typographical classes are used in the character segmentation.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.491-500
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• 2013

A connected component analysis from a binary image is a popular character segmentation method but occasionally fails to segment the characters owing to image noise and uneven illumination. A multimethod binarization scheme that incorporates two or more binary images is a novel solution, but selection of binarization methods has never been analyzed before. This paper reveals the best combination of binarization methods and parameters and presents an in-depth analysis of the multimethod binarization scheme for better character segmentation. We carry out an extensive quantitative evaluation, which shows a significant improvement over conventional single-method binarization methods. Experiment results of six binarization methods and their combinations with different test images are presented.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2004.08c
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• pp.814-818
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• 2004

Off-line handwritten character recognition is in difficulty of incomplete preprocessing because it has not dynamic and timing information besides has various handwriting, extreme overlap of the consonant and vowel and many error image of stroke. Consequently off-line handwritten character recognition needs to study about preprocessing of various methods such as binarization and thinning. This paper considers running time of watershed algorithm and the quality of resulting image as preprocessing For off-line handwritten Korean character recognition. So it proposes application of effective watershed algorithm for segmentation of character region and background region in gray level character image and segmentation function for binarization image and segmentation function for binarization by extracted watershed image. Besides it proposes thinning methods which effectively extracts skeleton through conditional test mask considering running time and quality. of skeleton, estimates efficiency of existing methods and this paper's methods as running time and quality. Watershed image conversion uses prewitt operator for gradient image conversion, extracts local minima considering 8-neighborhood pixel. And methods by using difference of mean value is used in region merging step, Converted watershed image by means of this methods separates effectively character region and background region applying to segmentation function. Average execution time on the previous method was 2.16 second and on this paper method was 1.72 second. We prove that this paper's method removed noise effectively with overlap stroke as compared with the previous method.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.117-140
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• 2013

Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India, with more than 300 million speakers. As there is no separation between the characters of texts written in Hindi as there is in English, the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems developed for the Hindi language carry a very poor recognition rate. In this paper we propose an OCR for printed Hindi text in Devanagari script, using Artificial Neural Network (ANN), which improves its efficiency. One of the major reasons for the poor recognition rate is error in character segmentation. The presence of touching characters in the scanned documents further complicates the segmentation process, creating a major problem when designing an effective character segmentation technique. Preprocessing, character segmentation, feature extraction, and finally, classification and recognition are the major steps which are followed by a general OCR. The preprocessing tasks considered in the paper are conversion of gray scaled images to binary images, image rectification, and segmentation of the document's textual contents into paragraphs, lines, words, and then at the level of basic symbols. The basic symbols, obtained as the fundamental unit from the segmentation process, are recognized by the neural classifier. In this work, three feature extraction techniques-: histogram of projection based on mean distance, histogram of projection based on pixel value, and vertical zero crossing, have been used to improve the rate of recognition. These feature extraction techniques are powerful enough to extract features of even distorted characters/symbols. For development of the neural classifier, a back-propagation neural network with two hidden layers is used. The classifier is trained and tested for printed Hindi texts. A performance of approximately 90% correct recognition rate is achieved.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.737-747
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• 2012

Recently, in order to support automatic meter reading for conventional metering devices, an image processing-based approach of recognizing the number meter data in the captured meter images has attracted many researchers' interests. Numerical character segmentation is a very critical process for successful recognition. In this paper, we propose an efficient numeric character segmentation method which can segment numeric characters well for any metering device types under diverse illumination environments. The proposed method consists of two consecutive stages; detection of number area containing all numbers as a tight ROI(Region of Interest) and segmentation of numerical characters in the ROI. Detection of tight ROI is achieved in two steps: extraction of rough ROI by utilizing horizontal line segments after illumination enhancement preprocessing, and making the rough ROI more tight through clipping utilizing vertical and horizontal projection about binarized ROI. Numerical character segmentation in the detected ROI is stably achieved in two processes of 'vertical segmentation of each number region' and 'number segmentation in the each vertical segmented number region'. Through the experiments about a homegrown meter image database containing various meter type images of low contrast, low intensity, shadow, and saturation, it is shown that the proposed numeric character segmentation method performs effectively well for any metering device types under diverse illumination environments.