• Smart Media Journal
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.44-49
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• 2015

Text line segmentation is a preprocessing step in OCR, which can significantly influence the accuracy of document analysis applications. This paper proposes a novel methodology for the text line segmentation of handwritten documents. First, the average width of the connected components is used to form a 1-D Gaussian kernel and a smoothing operation is then applied to the input binary image. The adaptive binarization of the smoothed image forms the final text lines. In this work, the segmentation method involves two stages: firstly, the large connected components are labelled as a unique text line using text line area mapping. Secondly, the final refinement of the segmentation is performed using the Euclidean distance between the text line and small connected components. The group of uniquely labelled text candidates achieves promising segmentation results. The proposed approach works well on Korean and English language handwritten documents captured using a camera.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.35-40
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• 2014

Text line segmentation is a critical task in handwritten document recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel text-line-segmentation method using baseline estimation and watershed. The baseline-detection algorithm estimates the baseline using Adaptive Head-Tail Connection (AHTC) on the document. Then, the watershed method segments the line region using the baseline-detection result. Finally, the text lines are separated by watershed result and a post-processing algorithm defines the lines more correctly. The scheme successfully segments text lines with 97% accuracy from the handwritten document images in the ICDAR database.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.660-667
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• 2000

In this paper, a word segmentation method for handwritten Korean text line images is proposed. The method uses gap information to segment words in line images, where the gap is defined as a white run obtained after vertical projection of line images. Each gap is assigned to one of inter-word gap and inter-character gap based on gap distance. We take up three distance measures which have been proposed for the word segmentation of handwritten English text line images. Then we test three clustering techniques to detect the best combination of gap metrics and classification techniques for Korean text line images. The experiment has been done with 305 text line images extracted manually from live mail pieces. The experimental result demonstrates the superiority of BB(Bounding Box) distance measure and sequential clustering approach, in which the cumulative word segmentation accuracy up to the third hypothesis is 88.52%. Given a line image, the processing time is about 0.05 second.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.161-166
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• 2011

We present a fast algorithm for Korean text extraction and segmentation from subway signboards using smart phone sensors in order to minimize computational time and memory usage. The algorithm can be used as preprocessing steps for optical character recognition (OCR): binarization, text location, and segmentation. An image of a signboard captured by smart phone camera while holding smart phone by an arbitrary angle is rotated by the detected angle, as if the image was taken by holding a smart phone horizontally. Binarization is only performed once on the subset of connected components instead of the whole image area, resulting in a large reduction in computational time. Text location is guided by user's marker-line placed over the region of interest in binarized image via smart phone touch screen. Then, text segmentation utilizes the data of connected components received in the binarization step, and cuts the string into individual images for designated characters. The resulting data could be used as OCR input, hence solving the most difficult part of OCR on text area included in natural scene images. The experimental results showed that the binarization algorithm of our method is 3.5 and 3.7 times faster than Niblack and Sauvola adaptive-thresholding algorithms, respectively. In addition, our method achieved better quality than other methods.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.17D no.6
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• pp.463-470
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• 2010

We presented a very fast and robust method of text line segmentation based on the DCT blocks of color image without decompression and binary transformation processes. Using DC and another three primary AC coefficients from block DCT we created a gray-scale image having reduced size by 8x8. In order to detect and locate white strips between text lines we analyzed horizontal and vertical projection profiles of the image and we applied a direct markov model to recover the missing white strips by estimating hidden periodicity. We presented performance results. The results showed that our method was 40 - 100 times faster than traditional method.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.729-739
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• 2010

Due to the rapid development of mobile devices equipped with cameras, instant translation of any text seen in any context is possible. Mobile devices can serve as a translation tool by recognizing the texts presented in the captured scenes. Images captured by cameras will embed more external or unwanted effects which need not to be considered in traditional optical character recognition (OCR). In this paper, we segment a text image captured by mobile devices into individual single characters to facilitate OCR kernel processing. Before proceeding with character segmentation, text detection and text line construction need to be performed in advance. A novel character segmentation method which integrates touched character filters is employed on text images captured by cameras. In addition, periphery features are extracted from the segmented images of touched characters and fed as inputs to support vector machines to calculate the confident values. In our experiment, the accuracy rate of the proposed character segmentation system is 94.90%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.31 no.9
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• pp.1121-1130
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• 2004

This paper proposes a method for line and word segmentation for machine-printed text blocks. To separate a text region into the unit of lines, it analyses the horizontal projection profile and performs a recursive projection profile cut method. In the word segmentation, between-word gaps are identified by a hierarchical clustering method after finding gaps in the text line by using a connected component analysis. In addition, a special symbol detection technique is applied to find two types of special symbols tying between words using their morphologic features. An experiment with 84 text regions from English and Korean documents shows that the proposed method achieves 99.92% accuracy of word segmentation, while a commercial OCR software named Armi 6.0 Pro$^{TM}$ has 97.58% accuracy.y.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.17D no.1
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• pp.59-66
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• 2010

Traditional OCR engines are designed to the scanned documents in calibrated environment. Three dimensional perspective distortion and smooth distortion in images are critical problems caused by un-calibrated devices, e.g. image from smart phones. To meet the growing demand of character recognition of texts embedded in the photos acquired from the non-calibrated hand-held devices, we address the problem in three categorical aspects: rotational invariant method of text region extraction, scale invariant method of text line segmentation, and three dimensional perspective mapping. With the integration of the methods, we developed an OCR for camera-captured images.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics B
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• v.31B no.6
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• pp.91-103
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• 1994

As CAD systems are introduced in the filed of engineering design, the necessities for automatic drawing input are increased . In this paper, we propose a method for realizing automatic drawing input by separation of text regions and graphic regions, extraction of line vectors from graphic regions, and recognition of circular arcs and circles from line vectors. Sizes of isolated regions, on a drawing are used for separating text regions and graphic regions. Thinning and maximum allowable error method are used to extract line vectors. And geometric structures of line vectors are analyzed to recognize circular arcs and circles. By processing text regions and graphic regions separately, 30~40% of vector information can be reduced. Recognition of circular arcs and circles can increase the utilization of automatic drawing input function.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.30-38
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• 2012

Text extraction and binarization are the important pre-processing steps for text recognition. The performance of text binarization strongly related to the accuracy of recognition stage. In our proposed method, the first stage based on line detection and shape feature analysis applied to locate the position of a business card and detect the shape from the complex environment. In the second stage, several local regions contained the possible text components are separated based on the projection histogram. In each local region, the pixels grouped into several connected components based on the connected component labeling and projection histogram. Then, classify each connect component into text region and reject the non-text region based on the feature information analysis such as size of connected component and stroke width estimation.